


Zen and the Art of High School Survivalism

by errantcomment



Category: Megamind (2010)
Genre: F/M, High School AU, mundane AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-01
Updated: 2013-08-01
Packaged: 2017-12-22 02:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/907740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/errantcomment/pseuds/errantcomment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roxanne Ritchi is the student editor for the school paper, on the cusp of graduating. All seems to be going pretty smoothly, except for this blue kid, who is intent on mischief, mayhem, and being generally irritating. In the mean time, Roxanne's getting long emails from this kid called Bernard, and Wayne Scott, the school sports god, is suddenly paying attention to her. The question is, who is she going to wind up going to prom with?</p><p>High school AU in which people have powers, Megamind is kind of a punk, and Roxanne considers becoming a nun, because seriously, at this point that would be easier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Credit where it's due!
> 
> Song lyrics from [Unforgiven 2 by Metallica](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Bn_kD6QN4%22).
> 
> Quotes stolen from John Green via Tumblr.
> 
> Beta'd by this guy I found under the bed.

Roxanne liked to be first on the scene, but this was ridiculous. She backed up against her locker as the Coke bottle shot past spraying yellowy foam, past other students who squealed and dived into classrooms and cowered against the lockers in an attempt to avoid the onslaught of mint-fuelled fizz-poppers. _Mint fuelled fizz-poppers._ That was a good one, she’d have to remember it. She peered through the foam, and there he was, like she knew he would be. Really, who else could it be? His green eyes were lit up and he was cackling maniacally, clutching at his ribs as Wayne Scott loomed over him, dripping Coke.

“You really need to change your locker combination.” The blue kid—Junior, wasn’t it? ducked Wayne’s lunge. “Catch me if you can!”

He made it two steps over the sticky floor before several of Wayne’s football buddies dogpiled him, and Junior’s head bounced off the linoleum, hard. For a moment, it looked rather bleak for the skinny idiot, but then the principal dragged him up by the collar. His cool gaze took in the scene. He stared down at a Coke bottle as it spun to an ashamed halt at his feet, and the student body took a step back. Junior hung in the principal’s grasp, and when the principal spoke, it was like the voice of God.

“Okay, show’s over people. Don’t you have classes to be in?”

As he was dragged past her, Junior caught Roxanne’s eye and winked and Roxanne rolled her eyes, blushing despite herself. Junior had come in during winter term, and since then he’d been making a semi-regular nuisance of himself, usually targeting Wayne Scott and his friends in an increasing number of bizarre, improbable, and downright messy pranks. The bell rang, and Roxanne jerked out of what may or may not have been a reverie about green eyes to pick her way across the wet floor to journalism class.

Hal was waiting for her at the classroom door. As the nose-wrinkling smell of Axe body spray hit her, Roxanne wasn’t sure if she didn’t prefer the smell of minted Coke. He held out a hand and Roxanne high-fived it reluctantly. As ever, his hand was slightly damp, and Roxanne rubbed her hand on her jeans to get rid of the feel. It wasn’t that Hal was a bad person per se... Just... 

He followed closely behind her as she walked past him into the classroom. “Hey, Roxie. Did you hear about that little blue squit did?”

“I was there, Hal,” Roxanne sighed, dumping her bag by her usual desk.

“Are you gonna write a story on it? You know, the menace of our hallways…” Hal attempted to lean suavely on the desk and it creaked ominously.

“Well, no. If nothing else, that’s not the point of the paper.” Roxanne pointed out. “Anyway, he’s not a menace; he’s a nuisance.” She rubbed her nose. The waft of Axe was making her nose itch. “Have I had your reviews yet this week?”

“Uh…” Hal suddenly looked a little uncomfortable.

“The school play opened last week, didn’t it?” Roxanne opened the folder she kept specifically for journalism class and flipped through the ‘to-do’ list. Hal backed off, taking his cologne with him.

“Yeah, and I went and everything, but the school play is always terrible. I’m pretty sure all those men are so angry because they have to sit through that play like, all the time.” Hal whined.

“You can’t say that. Miss Trelawney’ll be after you.” Miss Trelawney was the head of drama, and held the belief that any acting was a sign of inner beauty and deep meaning. She also had a wicked tongue on her, and had never forgiven Hal for his review of the annual fund-raising revue ( _‘The fund-raising should be for acting lessons!’_ )

“That’s totally unfair. What about the freedom of the press?”

Roxanne rolled her eyes. “Tell you what. You write whatever you like, and then you can explain freedom of the press to Miss Trelawney.”

Hal gave her a hurt look. “Nah, it’s cool.”

“That’s what I thought.” Roxanne went back to her to-do list.

“Anyway… Roxie…”

“What, Hal?” Roxanne put her pencil down, exasperated. She hated being called Roxie. It made her sound like some sort of cheap actress, and she didn’t even like drama.

“So I got a free ticket for the play tonight. Do you want it?”

“That ticket is for you, Hal. And I thought you said you’d seen the play.”

“Uh, yeah, I have but, I like, I thought that you might want to go…”

“On my own?” Roxanne stood up and plucked the ticket from his fingers. “Hal, this is the ticket I gave you. You weren’t going to try and get me to go with you on the ticket I gave you, were you?”

“Well, I mean, no…”

Roxanne risked the Axe aura to tuck the ticket back in his pocket. “Go write some copy, Hal.”

“So that’s a maybe?” Hal asked, hopefully. 

Roxanne gave up, and went over to Ronnie, a kid who was sitting at one of the computers with the tablet he brought from home. He was one of the best artists Roxanne had ever met. He had passed over the classes usually offered to extra-ability kids to do journalism, saying that since his glasses stopped him from literally seeing right through people, he probably didn’t need to learn to control his abilities, and anyway, those classes were boring and they wouldn’t let him draw without asking him if he drew it because he was angry. 

“Any submissions?” Roxanne asked.

No one was quite sure whose idea it had been to hook the printer up to the only computer in the room with Photoshop, but Mr Summers, who was in charge of the journalism course, had no luck with the ‘strange techno-Gollum’ he claimed ran the IT department. It wasn’t a big problem; it just meant that Ronnie got to deal with submissions as well as graphic design and the cartoon. That is, he rolled his eyes, put down his tablet and sent a ‘we got this’ email to the contributor, printing it off for Roxanne to look over.

“There.” He pointed with his stylus, not looking up. Roxanne picked them up, and looked over Ronnie’s shoulder interestedly.

“Is that this week’s cartoon?”

“Yep.” Ronnie pushed his glasses up his nose, frowned, and made an adjustment to the picture on-screen. “It symbolises the struggle between the masses and the man.”

“Oh…” Roxanne tilted her head uncertainly. “Is… Is that supposed to be the football team standing on the apple?”

“Yep.”

“Oh… Well, it’s very good,” Roxanne said, slightly doubtfully.

“Thank you,” Ronnie said, in a polite but firm go-away tone of voice. Roxanne picked up the sheaf of paper and went back to her desk as Mr Summers walked in.

“Good haul this week, Miss Ritchi?” Mr Summers was a tall, spare man with ginger hair brushed back from his temples. Roxanne liked his fancy waistcoats and gold chain with an actual watch on the end, and his esoteric approach to teaching. He assumed everyone was of at least equal intelligence with himself, and got very irritated with what he called ‘wilful laziness’. Sometimes the whole class would stop, and have ‘smackdowns’ where you had to use insults from the sixteenth century or earlier to defeat your opponent.

She smiled up at him. “The usual, I think. I haven’t had a proper chance to check yet.”

Mr Summers held his hands up in an elegant say-no-more gesture. “Don’t let me stop you.”

Roxanne sat down with a little sigh, flipping through the print-outs eagerly. There was one submission that she always looked out for, but it didn’t appear to be there. She frowned, maybe she had gone past it. She looked through more carefully, turning the pages over when she was done. Still not there.

She leaned back on her chair till she could see Ronnie. “Hey, Ronnie?”

Ronnie looked over with a slightly exasperated frown. “What?”

“Did you get a submission from Bernard?” Roxanne tried for casual, since you know, this was was no big deal. She just wanted to make sure that a regular submission came in, and stuff. No big deal at all.

“I don’t know.” Ronnie turned back to his tablet. “That’s your job.”

“Can you check?” Roxanne rolled her eyes. Bernard was one of their best contributors. His copy was always perfect; all Roxanne had to do was mark it up for Ronnie to put in the lay-out. Not to mention his writing. She’d never read anything that seemed so completely get what it was to be young, and uncertain, and in high school. She had taped a quote from one of his articles into her folder as a reminder to herself. _"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."_ Proofing his work was often the highlight of her week. When she read his prose, she could almost ignore Hal’s aftershave. She sighed, and then jumped when a pen hit her desk.

“There’s nothing there, sorry.” Ronnie said. Roxanne blinked. For Ronnie, that was a soliloquy. He gave her raised eyebrows in a are-you-crazy look. “Can I have my pen back now?”

“Oh, sure.” Roxanne tossed the pen back. Maybe he was sick. Bernard, not Ronnie. Well, maybe Ronnie. After all, that had been almost twelve words in a row.

“Roxanne? Hey, Roxanne. You okay?” It was one of the freshman girls. Her name was Carla, or something. 

“Yeah, fine.”

“Only you’ve been staring at your folder for ten minutes now…”

“What can I do for you?” Roxanne put a smile on her face. She’d learned that was for the best with the freshmen. They scared so easy nowadays.

“I finished that article. The one about fashion for down-town socialising?”

“Down-town?” Now it was Roxanne’s turn to do the raised eyebrows thing.

“Yeah, you know, because sometimes there are those super-fights, right? Like, there’s no reason you can’t still be stylish just ‘cause you have to climb over a little rubble to get to the city’s hottest spots for shopping and socialising.”

Roxanne gave Carla a long look while she tried out a few responses to this. Carla was starting to do that nervous edging thing that all the freshmen seemed to do at some point.

“Did you cite all your sources?” Roxanne finally asked.

“Uh-huh. And I wrote down where you can find pictures of the clothes.” Carla handed over a couple of sheets of paper, and the nervous smile turned eager, as she started to read. Roxanne put the paper down and smiled up at her in what she hoped was a reassuring manner.

“Fine. Leave it with me.”

Carla bounced off. Roxanne read it, and scrawled _’Ask Ronnie abt fashion spread?’_ across the top and put it in the ‘done’ pile. Then she started looking over the other submissions. The first one was called _’Coca-Cola: Delicious Drink or Nefarious Nectar?’_ She winced.

“It’s a drink, not a super-villain…” She mumbled, and then raised her voice. “Ronnie, promise you’ll let me know if anything comes in from Bernard, will you?”

“Right.”

Roxanne, still not pleased, turned back to the article in front of her. _“Coca-Cola, considered a cooler in clement climates and coveted by kids…”_

 

~*~

By the end of class, Bernard still hadn’t sent his column. And Ronnie had thrown an eraser at Roxanne’s head when she asked for the fifth time. Surely it wasn’t unreasonable to expect someone to hand in a submission by the end of class. Wherever they might be. So she decided the best thing to do was to write an email. Roxanne pulled out her phone and absently stepped over Junior’s legs where he was scrubbing the floor and lockers. 

`From:roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`To: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`Date: 14 March  
` `Subj: Deadline for contributions`

`Hi Mailing List,`

`Just a reminder that the deadlines for submissions is midnight tonight!`

`Yours,`  
`Roxanne Ritchi  
` `Student Editor`

That should about cover it, she decided. There had never been a deadline for submissions before, really, but maybe it was time to start. The mailing list line was a good idea as well. That way it looked like professional concern than worrying over some guy she wouldn’t know from Adam. She fetched out the book that her history teacher had insisted they buy, despite the fact that so far, all Roxanne had done with hers was use it as a shield that one time someone had invented super-bouncy silly-putty and unleashed it on an unsuspecting school populace. Behind her, someone’s phone went off, and she heard Gil Abbott say with a sort of idiot I’m-so-clever grin in his voice,

“Hey bro, put your phone down, you missed a spot…”

A bucket clunked as it was knocked over, and then Wayne Scott was yelling, “What the hell man, these are new shoes!”

“And I just cleaned them for you,” Junior replied, smugly.

“Hey, what’s the ruckus?” Mr Green, a music teacher, came pounding up the hall from where he’d clearly been hiding out in the teacher’s lounge instead of watching the miscreant.

“I slipped…” Junior began and Roxanne shook her head as she turned the corner. 

Say what you like, the kid had chutzpah.

It occurred to Roxanne that chutzpah was definitely a double-edged sword. When Junior bothered to show up to English, he sat in a seat at the back of the classroom, slouched at the back of the class with his tacky and spiky leather jacket slung over the back of his chair. He was wearing a flannel button-down shirt and a pair of tight skinny jeans. Roxanne idly wondered why he wore button-downs instead of t-shirts. A Slayer t-shirt would be more rebel without a cause, especially with the jacket. It had probably been quite nice before he’d applied spikes in the same way small children finger-paint. She put her chin on her hands. Was it weird that she noticed he never wore t-shirts? Maybe. But then, she noticed things about other students. Like Hal’s body spray. But then, no one could miss Hal’s body-spray. There were probably aliens on Alpha Centauri waving sensory tentacles and going ‘what is that funk?’ Junior didn’t smell of body-spray. Well, he did a little, but mainly he smelt of leather and fabric softener. Which she knew because he walked past her desk. That was the sort of thing you just happened to notice about people without being creepy, right? She jumped when a paper landed on her table, and blushed, even though logically there was no way that Mrs Hardick could know what she was thinking about. She smiled at the ‘A’ scrawled across the top of her page and had just got her books out when someone stood up behind her with a screech of chair.

“Yes?” Mrs Hardick put her hands on her hips.

“Why does it say ‘See me’ on my paper?” It was Junior. It would be. Roxanne rolled her eyes. He just seemed to be out to cause trouble in this class. At least once a week, he would get into a row with Mrs Hardick. One that more and more often ended with Junior leaving. She had to wonder how he intended to pass the class at all. Roxanne was pretty sure she wouldn’t get away with it but extra-ability kids always seemed to get a little leeway.

“Because I would like to discuss it with you in private. Would you sit down please.” Mrs Hardick didn’t really ask it.

“What’s to discuss? I wrote the paper. I wrote more than a thousand words and I cited my sources and I answered the damn question. I came after shool and asked and you said that’s what I needed to do to get a grade. So why don’t I have a grade?” He demanded. 

Everyone was looking round now. Junior’s blue cheeks were flushed magenta and he was waving a wad of paper.

“It’s clearly not your work.” Mrs Hardick snapped.

“How is it not my work?” He waved it again. “It’s got my name on it!”

“Fair,” Roxanne muttered, despite herself. 

“There is no way you could have produced that! I wouldn’t expect this of most college students!” Mrs Hardick’s nose had gone white; a sure sign of danger.

“So what you’re saying,” Junior’s voice was soft and dangerous. A shiver ran down Roxanne’s spine. “Is that it is too good to be my work?”

“I…” Mrs Hardick stuttered into silence.

“Fine.” He picked up his books and jacket.

“You sit down right now, mister.” Mrs Hardick said shrilly.

“No,” said Junior, calmly, and swept out. Even in the excitement of the moment, Roxanne noticed that they were very tight jeans. He stalked past Mrs Hardick, and Roxanne wondered if anyone else had noticed her flinch away. Chutzpah clearly had its disadvantages.

 

~*~

Roxanne didn’t get to check her email as soon as she got home. Her mother was home early from work and insisted that they catch up over coffee ‘like career-girls’. When she finally booted up her elderly but faithful old Mac, there was an email.

`From: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`To: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`Date: 14 March`  
`Subj: Contribution for week 14  
` `Attch: schoolpaper14.doc`

`Dear Ms Ritchi,`

`I apologise for my lateness—I was unavoidably detained. Please find attached my submission for the school paper this week.`

`I remain,`  
`Yours,  
` `Bernard.`

`PS: If you decide to send an email to a mailing list, you should really make sure you have a list first… ;)`

Roxanne flushed, toes curling. Of course, the paper had no mailing list. And a regular contributor would know that. She read the email again, lingering over ‘unavoidably detained’ as she ate a peanut-butter sandwich. Even in an email he had a way with words that was well, it was different from most people she knew.

`From: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`To: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`Date: 14 March  
` `Subj: Busted.`

`Dear Bernard,`

`Thank you for your prompt reply. Your submissions are gratefully received.`

`I must admit, reading your copy is often the highlight of my week.`

`Roxanne.`

 

After hitting send, she stared at the screen, her stomach unaccountably fluttering. It was perfectly reasonable that she should give a regular contributor a compliment. Especially someone with Bernard’s talents. And the subject line had been a… A joke. Yes. Admitting concern was reasonable. Right. So she should stop staring at her email and get up to do her homework at her vanity—her computer dinged and she almost became fatally tangled with the chair trying to sit back down.

`From: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`To: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`Date: 14 March  
` `Subj: Busted indeed`

`Dear Ms Ritchi,`

`Your encouragement is appreciated. I must admit, I admire your own writing very much. If there is any criticism to make, it is that you appear to have missed the point of the character of Gatsby. If he existed today, he would most certainly prefer rock over jazz. Gatsby’s greatest trick, after all, is that he doesn’t care about the rumour mill, using it to build an armour around himself instead. Imagine if you knew someone who was always elegantly unruffled and perfectly poised, and then you learned they were getting down and dirty in the mosh-pit of a Black Sabbath concert (we’re talking back in the day here, I doubt any of Sabbath's fans could manage a mosh-pit without putting their backs out nowadays…) Intrigued yet?`

`I remain`  
`Yours,  
` `Bernard.`

`From: roxiemoxie@metmail.com  
`To: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com  
`Date: 14 March``  
` `Subj: A Yellow Rolls-Royce`

`Dear Bernard,`

`Don’t you think, in today’s modern age, jazz would be more fitting for the myth you say he’s trying to build though? An elegantly dressed student of expensive tastes, his departure from the crowd symbolised in his choice of music…`

 

~*~

Roxanne hadn’t told anyone about Bernard straight away. She had thought her occasional editorial attempts at critical thinking had gone unnoticed, since most of the student population read the paper for the funny pages, or to see their name or their club in print. Roxanne didn’t mind, per se, but it was nice to see she wasn’t just shouting down a well. Bernard challenged her in a way that her other friends never did. He actually seemed to want to spend hours dissecting books, television and movies without getting bored. He was funny, charming and creative. Sometimes, Roxanne wasn’t even sure if she hadn’t made him up. They clicked in a way that was almost too good. Part of her worried that if she told anyone about him, he would just disappear, like a really good dream. When she found herself entertaining this particular notion, she realised she was being particularly ridiculous, and resolved to tell Monique about him as soon as she could. Monique was her best friend and a bona fide math genius. Most of the time, Roxanne couldn’t stand her, but they told each other everything. What with Monique having chess club at lunchtime on Thursdays, she didn’t actually get to talk to her till last period — current events.

“I can’t believe you’ve gone all like twitter-pated over a nerd on the internet.” Monique snapped her gum idly.

“I have not.” Roxanne found herself blushing again, to her great irritation. “He’s a friend. He’s nice. And he likes talking about books. I’d be this pleased if you liked talking about books as well.”

“Yeah. Right. Look, just ask him out to the mall and over ice-cream tell him you’d like to find out if his cock matches his massive brain.” 

Before Roxanne could respond with the righteous violence this advice deserved, there was a clatter behind her. Junior had fallen off his chair. He struggled up while a couple of guys laughed at him and glared when he saw her staring.

“That kid is so weird,” Monique commented. “You know, I heard he got kicked out of like, every other school in the area? Extra-ability kids, you never can tell…” This coming from a girl who was a technicality off having extra-abilities of her own. 

Roxanne sighed, shrugged non-committally as the teacher came in and events inexorably became current.

 

~*~

`From: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`To: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`Date: 26 April  
` `Subj: Knocking on social doors`

`Dear Roxanne,`

`It feels pleasantly strange to use your first name. Even Holmes and Watson never allowed themselves that level of intimacy…`

 

Roxanne hunched over her desk, engrossed in Bernard’s latest article. He had titled it _’First Name Basis’_. She had seen some of it before, but seeing it like this was completely different. She curled her toes in her sneakers and pulled out the Red Pen Of Doom, but made no move to mark the copy.

“Hey, Roxanne!” Roxanne blinked and looked up. Ronnie was standing over her, looking faintly irritated, although, that was fairly normal for him.

“I set out that prom venue spread. Even though prom is still ages away. Want a look?”

“It’s not ages away, it’s like, the end of term…” Roxanne looked back down at Bernard’s copy, slightly wistfully.

“Well, if you’re too busy…” Ronnie raised his eyebrows, and Roxanne definitely detected a hint of mischief there. That was something she’d noticed about Ronnie, he had very mischievous eyebrows.

“No, it’s fine.”

“Are you sure? You’ve gone all pink…”

“I have not. Shut up.” Roxanne hit him with a pen and felt a bit better.

 

~*~

`From: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`To: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`Date: 1 May  
` `Subj: Reasons you are just generally wrong`

`Dear Roxanne,`

`I don’t see how you can just dismiss the undeniable cultural influence of fifty years of music. Sure, most of the classic superheroes predate rock supergroups like Queen, the great Alice Cooper, and of course the superlative Led Zep, but you can’t possibly begin to pretend that the more recent shift in style—for example bad guys in leather, good guys in spandex jumpsuits that Elvis would have thought a bit much is completely accidental…`

 

~*~

Roxanne was eating her lunch and reading a book when Hal’s body spray washed over her—today was the day Monique sang in the school choir at lunch. She wrinkled her nose and then felt a little bad. Maybe no one had told him about how it wasn’t supposed to be a replacement for showering. Or that the adverts weren’t real.

He leaned over her, grinning into her face. He had spinach in his teeth. “Sooo... Roxie. Eating lunch huh?” 

“That’s what all the cool kids are doing.” Roxanne wondered if her eye twitched when he said ‘Roxie’. He probably wouldn’t notice anyway.

“So, I was thinking of having like, a party on Friday. My parents are out of town so it’s gonna be like, totally wild or whatever. I mean, I’m gonna get like dip and whatever.”

“Uh-huh...” Roxanne looked back down at her book a little sadly. It had just got good as well. 

“So like, I figured you’d want to come and stuff, because like, yeah, it’s gonna be totally awesome.”

“I don’t really like big parties...” Roxanne tried, a little hopelessly. Her salad was actually visibly wilting. She knew how that felt.

“Yeah, but it won’t be big. It’ll be like, intimate and stuff.” Hal said enthusiastically.

A couple of girls further down the table were listening with idle interest. “When is it?” One of them asked.

“Uh, this Friday,” Hal said, caught off-guard. “So I’ll see you then, Roxie?” He looked eager, like a puppy just before it peed on the rug.

Roxanne winced. The girls were watching with interest. She did the only thing she could think of. She said yes.

She had just got back into her book when a shadow fell over her. “Is this seat taken? I thought not.” 

Roxanne smiled at him, tightly. Wayne Scott had won the genetic lottery when it came to extra-abilities. He was extra-strong, he could fly, he could shoot a heat beam out of his eyes whenever he wanted to, and he was pretty much invulnerable to everything. In the five years or so Roxanne had known him, he had never had a cold or broken a bone or got so much as a paper-cut that she’d heard of. He was also handsome and charismatic, and boy, did he know it. Roxanne had managed to avoid his charms so far, which she was okay with. The most interesting thing Wayne Scott did was play football. Most extra-ability kids didn’t bother with regular sports, since they weren’t supposed to use their natural abilities. Wayne Scott, however, knew how to throw just hard enough, how to hold back so that he could still play with other kids. Roxanne had tried to interview him about it once, but he had been more interested her photographer, a pretty blonde girl by the name of Bella. After that, Roxanne had sent sophomore kids to talk to him. At the moment, it being spring term, they were mainly talking about baseball games. Wayne sat down and gave her a three-hundred watt smile.

“So, Roxie, what’re you reading?” He took a mouthful of sandwich. A couple of girls at a nearby table sighed rapturously. Roxanne wondered if they wanted to be the sandwich. Or maybe not. That was a little weird, even for high school girls.

“ _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_.” Roxanne replied. She didn’t hit him with the book for calling her Roxie. She liked to think this showed a certain amount of maturity on her part. Besides, Bernard had mailed her this book. It was probably bad form to hit someone with a book someone else gave you.

“Oh. I didn’t know you liked motorbikes.” Wayne took another huge bite of his sandwich. Roxanne found herself wondering how much he must have to eat. All that extra-strength and extra-speed had to get its fuel from somewhere.

Roxanne laughed like no one else had ever made that joke ever, and put the book aside. “What can I do for you anyway?”

“Well, I just came over to see if you were okay after that stupid dish soap gag that little blue idiot pulled this morning.” Wayne gave her his most melt-your-heart smile. The girls sighed again. They were going to pass out if they carried on like that. To be fair though, Wayne did smell really good.

“I’m fine, Wayne. Didn’t even get splashed, see?” Roxanne gestured down her front. Wayne’s eyes followed her hands, and one of the girls behind them made a noise like an enraged hamster.

“Not even a bit of trauma?” Wayne asked, when his eyes had managed to make it more or less back to her face. There was furious whispering behind them. Roxanne wondered if she and Wayne would be practically engaged by the end of the school day.

“Not even a little. Don’t sound so hopeful, jeez.” Roxanne smiled when she said it, and put her chin on her hand when Wayne laughed, a little bashful. He was definitely all eager charm and good looks, but that was it, as far as she could see.

“So I was thinking we should do something some time. Maybe you could show me your motorbike?” Wayne asked, finishing his sandwich. This time there were two angry squeaks, like the first hamster had gone away to find another friend to take on some of the burden of outrage.

Roxanne tilted her head. “Er, motorbike?”

“You know… When you’re done fixing it.” Wayne gestured to the book between them.

“Oh, but it’s not…” Roxanne stared at that big charming smile and gave up. “You know what, never mind. I don’t actually own a motorbike.”

“You just like reading about them?” Wayne looked confused. Roxanne found herself somewhat reminded of a dog who couldn’t work out why the cat-flap was too small. Was that an unkind thought? Maybe. He rallied magnificently though.

“Well, maybe we could go do something else?”

“I’m pretty busy at the moment. Some other time perhaps.” Roxanne picked the apple up from the side of her plate, and put her book in her bag as the furious whispering reached a fever-pitch. Maybe not engaged then... “I gotta go. Talk to you later, maybe.”

“Er, sure.” Wayne blinked. He probably wasn’t used to the girl ending the conversation first. Roxanne shrugged, picked up her tray with her suicidal salad on it, and walked away. He had to get used to it some time.

 

~*~

`From: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`To: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`Date: 10 May  
` `Subj: If you like Nirvana you should try Rush`

`Dear Roxanne,`

`What do I look like? Well, I am devilishly handsome and inhumanly suave. My fish says I’m short and too skinny, but he’s always saying things like that. Ignore him, he knows nothing. In the evenings, I sit in a huge leather chair wearing a velvet smoking jacket with a glass of iced-tea in a whiskey tumbler, and await your emails. Ancient and slightly tatty pyjamas are below me, of course…`

`From: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`To: bernardsubs@metmail.com`  
`Date: 10 May  
` `Subj: I tried Rush. Now you have to listen to Pulp.`

`Dear Bernard,`

`Sorry for my late reply! I ended up going to this party this evening, it was really awful. This guy I know from journalism class invited me. I didn’t really want to go but I couldn’t think of a way to say no. Anyway, I turned up and I didn’t know anyone, and I couldn’t even find him to say hi. It was completely ridiculous. I don’t understand why he didn’t put away his parent’s good china if he knew there was going to be a party; some of it was already smashed when I got there. Anyway, I’m home now, wearing my own smoking-jacket. I can’t believe your fish says you’re short, I bet you’re taller than he is, anyway…`

 

~*~

“Hey, Roxanne, the Blue Meanie’s staring at you.” Monique didn’t bother to keep her voice down, talking perfectly despite the lollipop she was sucking on.

“You really shouldn’t call him that; it’s not nice.” Roxanne resolutely didn’t turn around.

“Maybe he liiikes youuu…” Monique nudged her, giggling.

“Shut up, will you?” Roxanne slumped down. “It’s never gonna happen, so drop it.” You actually had a to have a conversation for anything to happen, and Roxanne thought she probably wouldn’t be his type anyway.He probably wanted to go out with a girl with lots of piercings and pink hair or something.

There was a clunk behind them followed by a desultory cheer, and then someone cursing. That Junior kid had managed to knock his can of soda over, which, Roxanne reflected, was probably why soda isn’t allowed. He rushed past her and Monique poked her with a decidedly annoying knowing look on her big stupid face. Roxanne went back to scowling. 

“Fine, tell me about you and Wayne Scott then. Since you’re so not interested in Blue Meanie.” Monique put her chin back on her hands, attentively.

“There’s nothing to tell…” Roxanne rolled her eyes. “He just bugs me during lunch sometimes.” Sometimes Monique was so obnoxious and nosy. Roxanne would have to find a new best friend. One that wasn’t interested in her at all…

“Ah, blossoming romance at its finest. You could be like, Romeo and Juliet except not dead or star-crossed or anything.”

“So… Nothing like Romeo and Juliet then.” Roxanne grinned, despite herself.

“Well, you could keep the passionate glove metaphors.” Monique sucked on her Tootsie-Pop. “Personally, I’m just glad you’re getting over that Bernard guy.”

“Mm, yeah…” Roxanne muttered non-committally.

“You are, aren’t you?” Monique asked, suspiciously.

“Er…” Roxanne fiddled with a pen. Monique still viewed Bernard with deep suspicion, on the basis that he was from the internet and so could be an axe-murderer. Also he used words of more than two syllables frequently and with ease, the sure sign of a deranged mind.

“Look, you need to stop like, mooning over this guy. Really.” Monique waved her lolly, narrowly avoiding Junior, who was hurrying past clutching a wodge of paper towel.

“I’m not mooning!” Roxanne snapped.

“Oh, Bernard is so smart. He’s so noble and his discourse so eloquent I about wet my panties whenever my phone makes that little email noise…” Monique clasped her hands together and crossed her eyes. There was another abrupt clunk behind them and someone behind them said, “Dude, if I had a head that big I’d be more careful of where I stuck it!” to general laughter.

“You’re awful. I do not.” Roxanne blushed. Why was Monique so loud?

“Do so. I’ve seen the wet spot.” Monique smirked. 

Roxanne picked up her ironic Barbie pencil case and beat her viciously. Monique wouldn’t learn, but it relieved her feelings.

“I just don’t get it.” Monique continued like nothing had happened. “You’ve never even met him.”

“Not all of us need a pretty face to be friends with someone.” Roxanne sniffed, sticking her nose in the air.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot, you’re totally in love with his intellect.” Monique stuck her fingers in her mouth and jerked back, miming blood and brains coming off the back of her head, slumping in her chair.

“You wouldn’t understand…” Roxanne put her chin in her hands with a huff.

Monique opened one eye, still lolling at her desk like a really irritating corpse. “What’s to understand? Just ask him out. At least that way you might stop looking at your phone like it’s personally victimising you, and we might be able to have a proper conversation about Luscious Lucius and about the fact he’s actually asked me to prom.”

She held out a self-righteous hand and Roxanne high-fived her. “I thought you said he wasn’t a big talker?”

“Well, okay, I think it’s the longest sentence he’s ever said. But still...” Monique shrugged, dreamily.

Luscious Lucius was Monique’s lab partner, and according to her, about the cutest thing since kittens. Roxanne realised with a slightly guilty jolt that actually, that was all she knew about him and that she was in serious danger of becoming that friend with all the romance drama. So she put her phone away and stole one of the Tootsie-Pops Monique kept in her pencil case for emergencies.

“So does this mean you do actually need to buy a dress?”


	2. Chapter Two

`From: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`To: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`Date: 15 May  
` `Subj: Anniversary!`

`Dear Bernard,`

`I can’t believe we’ve been talking for so long! We should celebrate. Say, at the mall? Sal’s Sundaes does the best ice-cream ever. Say tonight? It’ll save on angsting time. :P`  
`Your,  
` `Roxanne`

Roxanne pressed send with sweaty fingers, pushing herself away from her phone and flopping on her bed. Bernard gave her the sort of tingles she’d only read about, ones that started as a curl in her stomach and spread out into her fingers and nose. What if he said no? Worse, what if he said yes? She wasn’t sure which one scared her more. But Monique was right, irritatingly enough. Either there was something there, or there wasn’t. She rolled over to stare at the ceiling, suddenly regretting her decision—she felt a little like Bluebeard’s wife, but without the murder room. Stupid Monique. Things had been perfect as they were and now Monique had made them get all ruined… Someone knocked on the door and she almost fell off the bed.

“Roxie darling? You’re going to be late for school.”

“Right, right,” Roxanne sighed and sat up.

 

~*~

Bernard still hadn’t answered by the time Roxanne got into the Redoubtable Charger (a battered old Honda she’d saved up for months to buy). She almost ran a stop-light when her phone buzzed, and an outraged cyclist pounded her hood in retribution as he swerved to avoid her. Roxanne ignored this testament to road douchebaggery and fumbled for her phone. After all it might be an emergency. Like… A fire or something. Yeah, someone texting her about an emergency fire somewhere.

 **Hal** : Heyyy. i was wonderin if u were busay l8r?? ;)

Roxanne sagged, tossing her phone to the side. A car honked its horn behind her and she put her foot down. She drove to school hunched over the wheel, and parked hard, stomping on the clutch to relieve the tension. Monique was sitting on the brick wall surrounding the student carpark eating a Hershey’s bar. She didn’t move as the car careened to a halt, merely raising her eyebrows as Roxanne dumped her rucksack hard on the top of her car.

“What’s with you?”

“Nothing.” Roxanne slammed the door shut so hard it rocked the car on it’s axle. “Nothing is the matter.”

Monique stared at her, thoughtfully. “Well, it’s not PMS. So either you forgot to have breakfast or… Is this a boy thing? Did Wayne Scott say he’d call?”

“No.” Roxanne checked her phone. Well, checked was maybe a mild word, but there really was no snappy way to say ‘tried to melt it to a plastic blob with the intensity of her glare’.

“No to what—oh. I know what this is. You finally asked your internet creeper out for ice-cream.” Monique hopped off the wall.

“Shut up.” Roxanne put her phone back in her bag, sulkily. “How did you know it was ice-cream?”

“You always ask them out for ice-cream the first time. It’s like your thing.” Monique shrugged.

“I like ice-cream,” Roxanne protested, clutching her journalism folder to her like a shield.

“Yeah, but—”

Roxanne’s phone went off and she jumped a mile. Monique yelped as Roxanne’s folder buzzed past her as it flew out of Roxanne’s hands. Roxanne was fumbling in her bag, cursing to herself because her phone had found the extra-dimensional pocket in her bag and decided to live there forever more. Finally she found it.

`From: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`To: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`Date: 15 May  
` `Subj: Ice-cream??`

`Dear Roxanne,`

`I would love to.`

`I remain,`  
`Your  
` `Bernard`

“Your Bernard?” Monique hooked her chin on Roxanne’s shoulder. “I don’t think you needed to bother with ice-cream for this one.”

“Oh shut up. You’re so terrible.” Roxanne sent back a message (Great, see you at four!)

“I’m not the one smiling like a big doof.” Monique stuck her nose in the air.

“I’m not. Shut up.” Roxanne linked arms with her best-ever friend and Monique tried to pull away. Not very much though.

“Ohh, don’t, you’re going to get feel-good goobers all over me.” She handed Roxanne back her folder. Roxanne squeezed her best-ever friend’s wonderful arm and grinned.

“If you start a duet with a bluebird, I’m gonna leave.” Monique threatened.

“Shut up. I’m going to buy you a cookie.” Roxanne smiled. “Come on, I didn’t get any breakfast.”

She dragged Monique down the hall. She rather felt like she might be floating.

 

It was a good day for Roxanne. Not even Junior’s latest attempt at… Whatever it was he was going for could ruin it. Roxanne wasn’t there for the deed itself, but the cafeteria was closed for the rest of the day for clean-up. Something about sloppy joe on the ceiling, apparently. Roxanne didn’t really care. It was a nice day, and as a senior she could go down to the little of strip mall near the school that was entirely supported by students buying Twinkies and chips and the occasional packet of cigarettes, which meant she and Monique feasted on a wholesome and balanced meal of Ding Dongs and Doritos, washed down with Pepsi. She didn’t even mind when Hal laid a slightly moist hand on her arm in History and asked if he could do anything to help her recover from the trauma of what was already known as the Sloppy Joe Scandal, a curiously pleasing turn of phrase from the hive mind. She bumped into Wayne Scott on her way to journalism class. She would have avoided him, but the science club was entirely sure that prom night would coincide with a meteor falling to Earth about twenty metres from the prom venue, and Mr Summers was very keen on their long and badly-written article on the matter.

“Hey Roxie.” Roxanne smiled politely and wondered how much longer she could stand being called ‘Roxie’ in that jovial tone.

“You missed that Junior’s trick today. Boy, is that guy a psycho! Good thing I was there to reign him in.” Roxanne wondered if he always posed when he was talking to girls, and if so, did he know he was doing it? Was it an extra-ability? Could the ability to Vogue be considered an extra-ability? Roxanne realised that an answer was expected of her.

“Reign him in?”

“Yeah, he did this thing with a remote and all the sloppy joes on the table just went crazy!” Wayne smiled his movie-star smile at the thought. “So I tackled him and took him down before he could cause any more damage. And oh man,” he started to laugh. “Jimmy Garcia, he just hung on and kept right on eating. That guy, I swear…”

“You tackled him? He’s like half your size.”

“He’s dangerous, Roxie. Surely you can see that?” Wayne Scott’s chiselled brow wrinkled for a moment, but then quickly smoothed out into his usual easy grin.

“Say. Here’s my number.” He gave her a slip of paper. She raised her eyebrows at him.

“You know, in case you need saving from… Danger.”

“Right… Does that line ever work?” Roxanne asked, sceptically.

“Sometimes.” Wayne Scott gave her an aw-shucks-ma’am smile. Roxanne, to her great exasperation, found herself smiling back. He chucked her chin and she resisted the urge to bite his fingers.

“Think about it, Roxie.”

And off he sauntered like he thought he was John Wayne or something. Roxanne rolled her eyes and tried very hard not to feel flattered. As Monique strolled up, eating a cherry Tootsie-Pop, she cleared her throat and tried to gain a look of proper hauteur.

“What were you doing with Wayne Scott?” Monique looked after him, interestedly.

“Being protected from rampant sloppy joes, I think.”

“Ew.” Monique spotted the paper in her hand. “Oooh, what’s that?” She grabbed it and almost dropped her lolly.

“Is this Wayne Scott’s number?” Monique waved it excitedly.

Roxanne snatched it back. “Shut up, or everyone’ll want one.” 

“Man, guys must really dig on the whole nerd thing, huh?” Monique looked down at her own skate dress and boots. “Apparently indie girl is out?”

“How should I know? I don’t do the fashion column. Anyway, not that out. What about Luscious Lucius?” Roxanne was teasing, but Monique didn’t notice, or more annoyingly, didn’t care.

“I don’t think he knows what indie girl is…” Monique shook her head, sadly.

“Hey, at least if the Bernard thing doesn’t work out, you’ve got a spare.” Monique pointed out, as they walked down the hall to their next class.

“I like the way you always look on the bright side.” Roxanne nudged her, in a friendly way.

“Well, if you’re gonna be like that, can I have his number instead? I could use a spare.”

“No, get your own.” Roxanne put the slip of paper in her jeans pocket and stopped outside the journalism class. “Now go away, I’m very busy with important newspaper stuff.”

“Whatever. I don’t need you. I’ll get Wayne Scott’s number all by myself.” Monique pouted.

“Good luck with that.” Roxanne shut the door on her, in a loving way.

 

~*~

The end of the day found Roxanne peeling out of the car-park like Starsky and making it to the mall in double time. She spent some time in the car-park trying to fix her hair in the rear view mirror. The lipstick wasn’t right, though, she decided. Or was it? She tried both ways and suddenly realised it wasn’t the lipstick, it was her. She banged her head off the stearing wheel and her phone chimed.

 **MoMo:** Can’t believe you abandoned me to my fate on the school bus. ;_;

A moment later, it chimed again.

 **MoMo:** PS: The lipstick makes you look like a sexy librarian. Go give that guy his fines! Or something. X

Roxanne laughed, startling herself. Then she got out of the car and made her way to Sal’s Sundaes, which had a convenient bench outside it so you could wait for someone without actively loitering. She checked her phone. At least she was on time—a little early even. At first she scanned the crowd eagerly, but then she realised she didn’t want to seem desperate, so she got out her battered but loved copy of _Pride and Prejudice_. AFter a few minutes, she checked her phone, even though there were no new messages. She read twenty pages of _Pride and Prejudice_ as the after-school crowd began to thin. Perhaps he had been held up, she thought, checking her phone. She’d been holding it but sometimes the vibrate didn’t, right? She stood up, and paced up and down a bit. Was there another Sal’s Sundaes in the mall? She walked to the map of the mall briskly, but he wasn’t there either. 

` From: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`To: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com  
` `Subj: ?`

`Hi Bernard,`

`Just checking you meant the same place as me. Sal’s Sundaes?`

`Your,  
` `Roxanne`

Then she sat back on the bench scrolling through the messages they had exchanges. Surely he had just been held up—any minute now someone would come up and shyly ask if she was Roxanne, and he was so, so sorry he was late… Roxanne slumped on the bench. She felt like her heart had sunk into her shoes and the rejection beat her shoulders down. She’d never been stood up before, and it hurt keenly, like Bernard had stuck a knife into the space between her ribs. She stood up, sniffed, and left, head bowed.

`From: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`To: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`Date: 15 May  
` `Subj: My ice-cream melted.`

`Bernard,`

`I’ve got to say, waiting at the mall didn’t feel great. I really hope you’ve got a good excuse for this. Being made to wait for someone like that is humiliating. I expected better, especially because it’s you. I mean, you could have just said no.`

`Roxanne`

Lying on her bed, she reflected that it didn’t hurt just because he hadn’t come. It kind of felt like, by not coming, Bernard had rejected their whole relationship. Just as she was gloomily considering a life as a celibate feminist writer, spurning men because they would never understand her, her phone rang and she fell off the bed answering it.

“Ow—hello?”

“Roxanne? Well?” It was Monique. “Did you go with the red lipstick?”

“Yes…” Roxanne said, sadly.

“Oh, that’s not a happy voice. What did he do?”

“He didn’t do anything. He didn’t even bother to show up.” Roxanne firmly squashed the little wobble in her voice.

“What? That asshole!” Monique’s outrage made Roxanne hold the phone away from her ear, wincing.

“I’m going to hunt his creepy—”

“Monique! Shut up will you? It’s fine, alright?” Roxanne plopped back onto her bed.

“You better not have emailed him,” Monique said, threateningly. “He doesn’t deserve any of your amazingly well-proportioned pixels…”

“Er…” Roxanne shut her eyes against the oncoming onslaught.

“You emailed him? Oh come on Roxanne!”

“It might have been important. What kept him, I mean.” Roxanne protested.

“What could possibly be more important?” Monique demanded, exasperated.

“Well, he could have been sick. Like, real sick.”

“He’d have to be dead,” Monique replied darkly.

“Or his Mom might be sick. Or his Dad or his sister.”

“Oh come on, it was probably his goldfish. You should cut him off. He definitely doesn’t deserve you.” Monique was doing something clinky on her end of the phone. Probably fixing a sandwich.

“Well, I already emailed him,” Roxanne said, sulkily.

“Make him beg for it at least.”

“Sure.”

“You’d better.” Monique made a disgusted noise through her sandwich. “Why are women so girly over men?”

“Truly, we are a mystery.” Roxanne said, sympathetically.

“Damn straight. You gonna be okay? I can come over.” The sink ran briefly on Monique’s end, she was probably rinsing a glass.

“Are you in your jammies?” Roxanne asked.

“…Maybe. But you know I’d come over anyway, right?”

“Yeah, I know. Enjoy your sandwich.”

“Give him hell!” Monique said round a mouthful of whatever was in her sandwich. “You are woman! Roar at him!”

After she hung up, Roxanne got off her bed and went to find the plate of enchiladas her mother had saved for her. Unfortunately, not even the deliciousness of the enchiladas could distract from the fact that her phone had remained stubbornly quiet.

“You alright, princess?” her father asked as she washed her plate. He was sitting at the table, working on his laptop. “Have a nice time at the mall?”

“Sort of.” Roxanne shrugged non-committally.

“Want to talk about it, or is this one of those secret teen heartaches _Seventeen_ is always telling me about?”

“Daddy, why are you reading _Seventeen_ magazine?” Roxanne was scandalised, even though the Spanish Inquisition couldn’t have got her to admit to buying _Seventeen_ on a regular basis.

“For the make-up tips.” Her father deadpanned.

“Oh, my god.” Roxanne clapped a hand to her forehead.

“Hey, I can be cool too. Or is it wicked now?”

“No, Daddy, please, stop…” Roxanne covered her face with her hands.

“No, I’m down _wid_ it.” Her father made a vague gesture with his arms like he was having problems folding his arms. “I’m… Awesomesauce.”

“No, Daddy, please, I can’t stand it!” Roxanne wailed.

“Oh fine. Since you said please.” Her father looked down at his laptop again and Roxanne put her dish in the dish-washer.

“So do you think I should go for the smoky-eye look? Apparently it’s like, total glam.” Her father was grinning at her.

“Dad…” Roxanne found herself smiling back.

“There’s that smile.” He looked at her over the top of his glasses. “You sure you’re alright though?”

“I’m fine Daddy, just a little tired.” Roxanne hugged her father round the shoulders and kissed him on the top of the head. “I’m gonna have a bath and an early night I think.”

 

When Roxanne got back to her room, there was an email from Bernard waiting for her.

`To: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`From: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com  
` `Subj: Re: My ice-cream melted.`

`My dear Roxanne,`

`I can only apologise. I can only apologise a thousand times and hope you can forgive me. I don’t deserve it, but like all poor wretches who don’t deserve forgiveness, I hope for it nonetheless. At the end of the day, it is my privilege to hope after you, pray for a touch of your grace through the internet. Please know, if I had my time over there would be nothing that would have prevented me from seeing you rather than relying on imprecise pixels. I can only await your message. Please be assured that I remain,`

`Your,  
` `Bernard`

Roxanne read it through twice. She wasn’t going to be won over by pretty words and grovelling. She called Monique to tell her this.

“This had better be important, I’m watching House.”

“Listen to this.” Roxanne read the email out to her. She didn’t speak right away when Roxanne finally fell silent.

“Are all his emails like that?” she asked, finally.

“Some, yeah.” Roxanne tried not to sound pleased.

“Wow.”

“But we’re mad at him, right?” Roxanne got up from her desk and moved to her vanity to stare herself down in the mirror.

“Damn straight, we are enraged and outraged.” Monique was decisive. There was a pause in which Monique ate chips at her thoughtfully.

“A touch of your grace, huh?” she said, finally.

“I know…”

“But he didn’t come. If he cared that much, he would have come.”

“Rather than relying on imprecise pixels, you mean?”

“Yeah…” Monique trailed off into a crunchy silence. Presently she said, “You gonna email him back?”

“Probably.” Roxanne put her chin in her hand and looked herself in the eye.

“Hmm.” Monique popped the tab on a can of soda, a sure sign of deep thought.

“You don’t think I should?”

“Oh, sure. It’ll make you happy. Just… Go carefully?”

“Yes Mom.” Roxanne rolled her eyes.

“Oh whatever. Now will you leave me alone? I already missed like, five minutes of House being sassy.”

Roxanne laughed and hung up. Then she went back to her computer and opened her email client.

 

~*~

Wayne Scott found her during lunch, and sat down, smiling his usual easy smile.

“What do you want, Wayne?” Roxanne tried not to feel exasperated. Was it so much to want five minutes to eat a sandwich and read a book?

“You.” Wayne smiled crookedly, looking over his aviator sunglasses like he was James Dean.

“Are you kidding me?” Roxanne said, coolly, praying she wouldn’t blush.

“Well, sort of.” Wayne did that aw-shucks grin again. Roxanne rolled her eyes.

“I actually wanted to ask you if you were going to the prom with anyone.”

Roxanne blinked. She had a ticket to the prom, of course, but more recently she had been on the fence about whether she was going, because (and here she did flush with an odd little mix of emotion) she had sort of been hoping to go with Bernard. Bernard who hadn’t mentioned meeting since he stood her up. Bernard who had written a gorgeous article on the art of forgiveness ( _You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world… but you do have some say in who hurts you… to be forgiven by someone who was hurt by you, in their full knowledge that you might hurt them again is to feel like Alice, head dizzily sprouting upwards only to be scolded back down to earth, chin hitting your shoes. To be forgiven is a wondrous thing, we poor scoundrels can only pray endlessly for such succour…_ ), but had not told her why he hadn’t come. Wayne Scott was still looking at her with his eyebrows slightly raised.

She said yes.


	3. Chapter Three

`From: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`   
`To: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`   
`Subj: A proposition`

`My dear Roxanne,`

`I would consider it a privilege and an honour if you would come with me to the prom. This poor scoundrel hopes for it whole-heartedly. Perhaps I could even take you to dinner first?`

`I remain truly,`   
`Yours,`   
`Bernard`

 

`From: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`   
`To: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`   
`Subj: Re: A proposition`

`Dear Bernard,`

`I’m really sorry, but I’ve already said I’d go with Wayne Scott. If I’d had any idea, I would of course have said no. As it is, I feel it would be churlish to tell him I no longer wanted to go. A raincheck on dinner, perhaps?`

`Your,`   
`Roxanne`

 

`From: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`   
`To: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`   
`Subj: Re: Re: A proposition`

`My dearest Roxanne,`

`I understand entirely.`

`Your,`   
`Bernard`

Roxanne felt unaccountably irritated by this response. She stared at it for a bit longer, trying to work out why she was so cross, and more importantly if she could righteously blame it on Bernard himself. It rather felt like she couldn’t, which didn’t do much to improve her mood. She considered calling Monique, and then remembered Monique was out on a date with Luscious Lucius. So she ate an entire bag of Doritos in front of the television with her parents and went to bed feeling uncomfortably bloated. A fitting end to the day, she thought sulkily.

 

Roxanne was still stewing the next day, when Junior straggled in last. His hands were buried deep in the pockets of his leather jacket, and he kept his eyes on the toes of his enormous army boots (Roxanne noticed with some amusement that these also had spikes carefully punched in the uppers and the toe). It was odd though, usually he held his head up at an almost obscenely cocky angle, and walked with so much swagger he was actually in danger of flipping over. Today though, he sat down at the back of the room and toyed moodily with his pen.

Monique nudged her and passed her a piece of taffy. “What do you suppose got into Blue Meanie?”

“Don’t call him that,” Roxanne said, absently. “And why would I know?”

“You’re the one staring at him.”

“I am not…” Roxanne slumped in her seat. She definitely never stared at him, or appreciated the way the leather jacket cut along the line of his waist, nope. Right. Monique was staring at her with raised eyebrows.

“Oh shut up.” Roxanne growled. Monique didn’t push the question, which made Roxanne feel a little bad. She had spent the entire day in a strange funk, even she could tell that. 

After class, she walked down the corridor to journalism by herself. She had said yes to Wayne. And she should be happy to go with Wayne. In terms of guys in the school she would have said yes to, he was on the list. Which was good. And considering the rest of the list had been made up of Bernard and Ronnie—no wait, Ronnie was going with that sophomore fashion kid, wasn’t he—well, it looked like Wayne Scott was certainly a choice. And it would definitely be ungracious to back out now. Anyway, who else would she go with?

Junior rounded the corner, looking much more cheerful than he had done before.

“Hi Roxanne!” he panted.

“Uh, hi,” Roxanne replied, as Junior did an abrupt right turn and pulled open a seemingly random locker. He stepped into it and winked at her, pressing his finger to his lips as he closed the door just as a big group of guys she vaguely recognised as part of Wayne Scott’s crowd rattled to a halt beside her.

“Hey, it’s Wayne’s girl. Roxie, right? Did you see where that little blue jerk-off went?”

He clearly didn’t notice Roxanne’s eyes narrow, because he didn’t back away slowly. Wayne’s girl? Since when?

“…No,” she said, finally picking what seemed like the least anti-social response. “Why would you need him?”

“He broke Ernie’s finger, and he needs to learn you don’t go around doing that sort of thing.” This guy was clearly the brains of the group, but he still didn’t notice Roxanne suddenly take on a look of almost imbecilic innocence.

“Nope, I’m sure of it. How could I miss him?”

The brains looked disappointed, and then a new thought seemed to wander into his forebrain.

“I bet he’s gone to the library. Come on, we can head him off…”

And they pounded off again. Once Roxanne was out of sight, Roxanne yanked the locker door open. It was empty.

 

Roxanne didn’t tell anyone about the locker thing. For one, she couldn’t quite sort out how she felt about the wicked grin and frankly roguish wink. Also telling anyone ‘Hey, you know that blue kid, the one with the big leather jacket? Well I saw him shut himself in a locker and disappear like a low-budget Phantom of the Opera’ made you sound at best, crazy. So she didn’t say anything, and carried on with her day the best she could. 

As prom loomed closer, she went dress shopping with Monique, who had known she was going to prom for months, on the basis that on her own or with a date, she was going to have a good time. More recently however, she had run into a bit of a snag. Monique’s mother had promised that she would buy a dress for her, but at the last minute had come up with a much better idea. She wanted Monique to wear the dress she had worn to her own prom, in what Monique had despondently called ‘a mother-daughter bonding… thing’. It was a frilly off-the-shoulder number in neon pink, and Roxanne had thought it looked pretty amazing against Monique’s dark skin, but Monique had rejected it as a ‘blinding eye-sore of textile science’ (though not to her mother’s face) and insisted on buying a new one. This fitted in with Roxanne’s plans quite nicely, as she hadn’t bought her dress yet. So dutifully, they trooped off to the mall.

An entire mall full of shops later, and neither of them had found anything. It turned out three weeks before prom is not the time to buy prom dresses. Monique was entirely disgusted by it.

“Maybe we could just wear tuxes,” Roxanne suggested. “Like, with a pink shirt and stuff to show it’s a girl tux, not a boy tux.”

“I’m beginning to think you’re not taking this seriously.” Monique flipped through another rack.

“Just wear the pink dress. You look awesome in the pink dress, and you can just spend the two hundred dollars on something else.” Roxanne flopped onto the pedestal of a model. “And I’ll go in a paper sack.”

“Oh, but Mom will be smug forever. I have to find something. Next shop!” Monique made for the door, reminding Roxanne of a tired general who realises that victory lies in the next charge.

“There are no more shops.”

“What do you mean there are no more shops?” Monique demanded, stopping abruptly.

“I mean, we have walked from one end of this mall to the other and neither of us have found the dress that will prove your mother wrong, not make you look ‘too busty’, or cure world hunger.” Roxanne explained.

Monique spun round. “How do you cure world—”

“I don’t know. The dress would have, though,” Roxanne interrupted her, comfortingly.

Monique sighed. “It would have. Shall we get ice-cream?”

“Best idea.”

They walked to Sal’s Sundaes in relative quiet, stopping only to stare longingly at a shoe shop.

“They would be perfect with my dress.” Monique pointed with her Tootsie Pop.

“How do you know?” Roxanne was considering a pair of black pumps with cute little red bows on the toes. Even if your feet hurt, the little red bows could cheer you up with their cuteness. Which would be a good thing in a pair of shoes that might make your feet hurt.

“I just do. Should I buy them?”

Roxanne smiled despite herself. “Let’s get ice-cream first.”

They ordered hot fudge sundaes and took over one of the cushy four-seater booths. Sal’s sundaes were widely known to be like someone taping a block of ice-cream to your face and then covering you with sprinkles while you ate your way out of it, and there was a moment of happy silence to honour this fact. Finally, Monique pointed a spoon at her, and swallowed meaningfully. 

“You,” she stated, “are brooding.”

Roxanne leaned out of the way of a dangerously chocolate-y spoon.

“I am not.”

“Are too. What’s with that?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Roxanne stirred her ice-cream about, moodily.

Monique stared at her hard. “To the brain freeze?”

“Fine.” Roxanne said, licking her spoon in a show of bravado.

She took a large and deliberate mouthful of ice-cream, and Roxanne followed, not breaking eye-contact, and Monique took another spoonful of ice-cream. Roxanne took a bigger one, and Monique piled it up high, squinting as the back of her throat froze. Not be outdone, Roxanne theatrically put a sprinkle on the top of the ice-cream on her spoon and shoved it in her mouth, and promptly dropped her spoon, clapping a hand to her forehead as brain-freeze used an icicle to stab her right above the eye.

“Ha! I win. Tell me.” Monique pointed with her spoon again.

Roxanne rubbed her forehead till she could open her eyes again. “Fine. Bernard asked me to prom.”

“And why are we sad about this?”

“I already said yes to Wayne…” Roxanne picked up her spoon again and poked at her ice-cream. “So I told him no.”

“And you’re sad because now you can only go out with the buff guy who hasn’t stood you up and actually appears to be interested in you. Your life is so hard…”

“I know, right?” Roxanne sighed and gave the table a mournful look.

Monique rolled her eyes. “Oh really now. You know, if you’re that fussed, tell Wayne you don’t want to go.”

Roxanne twisted her mouth. “That would be kind of rude, wouldn’t it?”

“Well then, go to the prom with Wayne, and go out with Bernard some other time.” Monique said it like it was so simple. Stupid Monique with her one guy that she wanted to go out with.

“Oh, I suppose.” Roxanne licked her spoon pensively. “I just feel kind of bad, because, you know…”

“The magical brain connection, purer than mere hormones…” Monique clasped her hands to her chest dramatically and flopped back on her seat.

Roxanne smiled, despite herself. “Says you, going with the one guy who can comprehensively kick your ass at science.”

Monique grinned a little goofily. “He is Luscious, isn’t he? I just don’t understand why you’re not more psyched. Wayne Scott is like, gorgeous pie. With extra cream.”

What was it with Monique and her weird descriptions? “Ew. And I don’t know, he just doesn’t do much for me, I guess. I prefer my guys without cream, perhaps?”

“I dunno, cream’d be enough for most people…” Monique said, dreamily.

“Shallow people,” Roxanne said, disapprovingly.

“Damn straight.”

There was another moment of fudge-layered silence.

“You know that blue kid?” Roxanne said, finally.

“With like, the leather jacket, and the tacky spikes?” Monique said, gesturing at her shoulders to show where the spikes should be.

“Yeah, that’s him. What’s his deal?”

“I dunno. Don’t know much about him rather than rumour. You know people think he’s genetically modified? Like, born in a tube, put out into the world to test us...” She broke off at the look on Roxanne’s face and held up her hands. “Fine. He’s clever. Like, extra-ability clever, I think. He’s in AP Physics and Biology with me… Why do you want to know?” Monique narrowed her eyes.

“No reason.” Roxanne shrugged, innocent as you like.

“No reason my ass. I knew you were staring at him.” The spoon was pointing again. Roxanne didn’t like it’s accusatory gleam. She glared at it, then at Monique, who waved her spoon. “You liiiike him… Wait. You like him? But he’s like, crazy. And I hear he lives in a prison.”

“I don’t think that would be allowed?” Roxanne toyed with her spoon, uncomfortably. “Do you really think he’s crazy though? It might just be like, the smarts...”

“Well, yeah. He’ll definitely be dead in prison within like, ten years. You see it all the time with that sort of extra-ability, super smart no social skills types. Seriously Roxanne, you know he’s a bad idea, right?” Monique looked concerned with a blob of cream on her nose.

“Yeah, I know I know. But I can still appreciate what I’ll never have, right?” Roxanne protested, weakly.

“Yeah, be thankful you’ll never have that. Nothing but heartache,” Monique said, firmly.

“Yeah, I know. I eschew him with a firm hand.” Roxanne made a pushing movement with her spoon and almost knocked over her ice-cream.

“That’s the spirit! Wayne Scott, little nerdy internet guys. That’s the way to Roxanne boy bliss.” Monique’s spoon was enthused as the rest of her and Roxanne leaned back, for her own safety.

“I hate when you alliterate,” Roxanne grumped.

“Yeah, and I don’t think it’s fine when you rhyme, but there we go.” Monique pushed away her empty sundae glass, and looked out at the mall. “Shall we do another lap, just to make sure they didn’t sneakily put out new stock?”

Roxanne spooned up the last of her fudge. “Sure.”

 

~*~

At first, Roxanne thought maybe she was suffering from some sort of horrible nightmare brought on by ice-cream abuse. She lived in a quiet bit of suburbia where cars were unheard of between the hours of ten pm till six am, and when you’re sleeping with the window open, the sound of a motorcycle revving outside was pretty much the local equivalent of the apocalypse arriving. She rolled over and looked at her alarm clock, too sleepy to be really annoyed. Yet. She was about to go back to sleep when there was the rattle of gravel on her window. Roxanne sat up, a little weirded out—if nothing else, the driveway was tarmac. There weren’t even any pebbles in the garden. It was probably the bead curtain over her window rattling in the wind. Yep, definitely. And she should just get up and close it... There was a definite clunk from outside and then suddenly an electric guitar started up. She stared out of the window, wide-eyed and suddenly not a bit sleepy, recognising it it as Metallica, thanks to Bernard’s enthusiasm for the band. It wasn’t really her thing, especially at four am.

_“Lay beside me/tell me what they’ve done/speak the words I want to hear…”_

Roxanne flung her window open the rest of the way, clacking the beads on her curtain aside irritably. Junior was standing on the front lawn in front of a black chopper, lit up by a street lamp. He was wearing his usual leather jacket and skinny jeans, with aviator shades stuck down the front of his shirt, and holding an old-fashioned ghetto-blaster over his head. Roxanne blinked at him owlishly for a moment. What the hell was this? Some sort of weird power-play? After all, the little twerp probably would consider getting Wayne Scott’s prom date a sort of coup. Any butterfly-in-stomach feelings she might have even considered harbouring were suddenly, brutally, and even excessively killed by the fact that it was four am and she was being used as pawn in some ridiculous and infantile high-school rivalry.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she yelled over the noise.

“Roxanne, I—” Whatever Junior was about to say next as Roxanne’s slipper flew past his head. He ducked for cover, trying to protect the boom-box.

“Please, just let me explain!” The other slipper clipped his ear and he howled. Good.

"Oh my god, what is your problem?” Roxanne reached for the next thing to hand, which was the table-lamp on her vanity. She raised it threateningly and Junior actually dived behind his bike.

“Hey, what’s all that racket?” Her father was shuffling into the study, which also faced out over the front lawn, and Roxanne heard him open the window. Along the street, lights were starting to go on and she threw the table-lamp anyway. It shattered near Junior’s feet and he yelped again, hopping out of the way as ceramic shrapnel flew past him. Roxanne was even more annoyed—she had liked that lamp.

Her father was yelling out of the window. “You there, I’m calling the police! And your parents! Oh yes, just you wait…” 

Junior’s eyes widened and he bundled the ghetto-blaster and himself onto the bike and roared off down the street. Roxanne thought she saw an enormous fish in a saddle bag, but dismissed the notion as the wrong side of surreal. Probably just her sleep deprived brain making up weird shit because there was too much rage to process at this time.

“Roxanne?” Her father knocked on the door and opened it, clutching his dressing-gown around him. “Did you know that jerk?”

“Well, I thought I might, but it turns out not,” Roxanne said, closing the window firmly. “I think he was just some local kid.”

“Little punk,” her Dad said scornfully.

“Youth of today, huh?” Roxanne yawned and her Dad smiled wryly.

“That’s about the long and the short of it. You going back to bed?”

“I think so. I don’t think he’ll be back.” Roxanne kissed her father on the cheek. “Night Daddy.”

“Night sweetpea.”

 

~*~

Roxanne was still tired when she got up. She got a cup of her father’s horrible black coffee and sipped it, grimacing. She had never really developed a taste for coffee, and her father liked his morning brew ‘thick as tar, black as sin’. She drank it while she checked her email. All she got was a message from Bernard, complaining that the old adage ‘music soothes the savage breast’ was a complete lie and that he was currently grounded for believing it in the first place. Roxanne smiled, despite the horrible coffee. Bernard had proved to have a wicked sense of humour that frequently got him into trouble at home. Roxanne kind of liked it, but then, so far she’d kind of liked everything about Bernard. He would never wake anyone up in aid of a grudge match.

 

By the time she was dressed and sitting behind the wheel of the Redoubtable Charger, she had already decided not to tell anyone about Junior’s little display—after all, humiliating him wouldn’t do anyone any good. Maybe an insightful editorial on boundaries would make her point for her. Her phone buzzed and she checked it at a red light.

 **Hal** : Got a surprise 4 uuuuu. ;)

She groaned softly. She thought she’d made things perfectly clear with Hal numerous times over. Really, how many times do you have to say no to a date before they got the idea? Hal was a good guy, and not a bad writer either, but he really needed to learn the meaning of the word 'no', because it was starting to look a lot like sheer bad manners. Maybe she could get him to ask that girl who did the ‘student council correspondent’ piece, or was throwing another girl to the wolves too cruel? She sighed as she pulled into the student parking lot. It probably was. 

**Hal** : I think ull really liek it x Come to the oak tree where we first met.

Roxanne considered her options. ‘First met’ was a bit strong. He had found her eating lunch there after their first lesson together, and sat down far too close—every time she had shuffled up he’d followed her, and then he’d asked her if she wanted to split a jelly donut, least splittable baked good ever. She hadn’t, and had rushed off before he could ask her out for coffee. Maybe she could simply go to class and claim that she had missed his text. Or she could scope out the place and see what the likelihood of romance was, and then run away at the first chance of love hearts or little fat babies with wings. Finally, she realised that living in her car was not a viable life choice, and got out, slamming the door behind her. Hal was standing under the oak tree, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and a maroon tie that made him look a bit like a waiter, and holding a massive bunch of red roses. Roxanne tensed to make a break for it, but he spotted her first, waving. She smiled, sickly, and grasped the strap of her bag for strength. The shirt and tie were bad enough, but the roses just stepped this up from embarrassing to mortifying.

“Hey, Roxie!” Hal waved as though she might not see him otherwise.

“Hi, Hal…” Roxanne mumbled. “You know, I really would prefer it if you didn’t call me Rox—”

“I brought you these.” Hal thrust the flowers into her arms. “I figured, what girl doesn’t like roses?”

The smell of roses assaulted Roxanne’s senses. She flinched away from them—roses always made her feel so morbid. She had read _The Nightingale and the Rose_ as a child, and the image of the nightingale killing itself on the rose had stuck with her.

“Hal…”

Hal grinned at her soppily and Roxanne felt sick with embarrassment and guilt, suffocating on the red petals in her face. Music started from an iPod at their feet.

_“Loving you… Is easy ‘cause you’re beautiful…”_

Roxanne looked around for an escape route. Some people were actually stopping to watch, and Roxanne flushed with embarrassment.

“Roxie?” Hal took the hand that wasn’t holding the roses while Roxanne desperately wished for a way out. The school bell, the fire alarm, a meteor… Really, she’d take anything.

“Roxie, I wanted to ask you… We’ve been friends, like, forever. And I know you’ve always held back. But you don’t have to! We could be so much more! So I’ve decided to take the next step for both of us. Roxie. Roxaroo. Will you go to the prom with me?”

Roxanne stared at him. He was taking the step for both of them? A small crowd was watching with the semi-detached interest of any crowd of teenagers.

“Hal, I mean… This is all so much… But I already said I’d go with Wayne Scott.” Roxanne said it as gently as she could, knowing whatever she said was going to be awful.

Hal shrugged. “Well, that’s cool, just tell him you’re coming with me instead.”

“I can’t, Hal. It’s not fair on… On Wayne.” She had almost said Bernard.

Hal’s face fell, and he took her other hand, prompting a confusing moment where the roses weren’t being held up by anything except his determination. “No, you can! I brought you flowers! We’re supposed to go together!” 

“No, Hal…” Roxanne tried to pull away, hampered by the roses she didn’t want. 

Hal grabbed her wrist and his face contorted with rage. “No, this isn’t how it goes!”

He pulled her towards him and Roxanne finally dropped the roses and shoved him hard. His iPod fell out of the loudspeaker dock and fell mercifully quiet as he plopped back on his ass. In the silence that followed, their impromptu audience tittered as he stared up at her in shock.

“I’m not going to prom with you Hal, because I don’t want to. And I wish you’d get the point. There’s nothing between us. And there never will be.” Roxanne put her hands on her hips in rage, humiliation, and a little bit of pity that just made her feel even worse. “Do you get it now?”

“…Yes,” Hal muttered, dropping his gaze.

“Well, good.” Roxanne turned on her heel and let self-righteous anger propel her away. Otherwise she might stop and then she’d have no choice but to turn round.

 

~*~

`From: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`   
`To: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`   
`Date: 24 May`   
`Subj: The grand gesture`

`I just don’t get it, Bernard. Why do boys think one big gesture will change everything? You see it in the movies all the time, you know, just ruin a press conference or walk out of your own wedding. Okay, you told the girl of your dreams that you love her but you’ve completely rocked the foundations of her marriage. To your best friend. Nice going there. The best romantic gestures are small, neat. A look, a touch. Something that won’t end up getting half the cast killed in five days. That’s why I like you—or at least, your emails, having never actually met you… You whisper across the Ethernet far more efficiently than other people shout…`

 

`To: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`   
`From: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`   
`Subj: Whispering across the Ethernet`

`My dear Roxanne,`

`Sounds like you’ve had quite the week. I shall therefore cancel the parade I had scheduled to go by your house herewith. Not even the monkeys will cavort for you. And I made them practice specially.`

`I remain,`   
`Your,`   
`Bernard`

The next day, a copy of _Shakespeare’s Sonnets_ was delivered to her house, with several of them carefully bookmarked. The note with them read: _Perhaps one small monkey. B._ Roxanne grinned to herself.

She thought about the sonnets often that day, since by then the news of Roxanne and Hal’s public dispute had spread all over school, and it took her mind off people singing ‘Looooooving youuuuu’ at her in the corridors, which was disconcerting, then embarrassing, then plain annoying. The result was, that even with slightly mushy thoughts about sonnet forty-three, she arrived at journalism class in a foul mood. She slammed her folder down and didn’t look at anyone. The room went silent for a moment, and then conversation resumed at a slightly higher pitch.

Ronnie approached her first. He always did when the rest of the class thought she was too scary to go near. “Roxanne?”

“What?” she snapped.

“I brought you the lay-outs for the prom special edition.” Ronnie held out the print-outs defensively.

“Oh, thanks.” Roxanne felt a bit bad. It wasn’t Ronnie’s fault that the boys in this school were all stupid.

“And er, I wanted to ask you something.” Ronnie cocked his head innocently. He almost looked coy. Ronnie never looked coy. Roxanne was instantly suspicious.

“What?”

“Will you go to the prom with me?” His eyes behind the thick glasses were wide, innocent.

Roxanne stared at him. This really wasn’t fair… “Ronnie…” she groaned, and then saw him smile, just a little.

“Oh my god, you jerk!” She laughed, covering her eyes in relief.

Ronnie grinned briefly. “Well, I figured since everyone was asking I might as well see what the big deal is.”

“I may have to maim you.” Roxanne rolled up the print-outs threateningly. “You only need your hands to draw, right?”

Ronnie raised his eyebrows and quirked a smile before heading back to his tablet. Roxanne felt inexplicably better.

 

What with her sudden animal magnetism, it was almost a relief to make it to the day of the prom. School was winding down, and most of the teachers had given up teaching them any more, and let them play pen-and-paper games or watch movies. Monique had decided that the most delicious sin would be to play hooky in the grounds all day, so they spent most of the morning sitting under that oak tree, flipping through the yearbook. Monique was a bundle of nerves about the impending evening with Luscious Lucius.

“You’ve already been out with him like, a billion times.” Roxanne pointed out, as they ate a mutual tube of Pringles.

“Yeah, on field trips with the science club. This’ll be different.”

“How?”

“Well, you wouldn’t wear silver strappy heels for rock-pooling, would you?” Monique poked her in the side. “Not all of us are hoping for a romance-free zone tonight.”

Roxanne laughed. She couldn’t help but feel she was doing it wrong. The prom was supposed to be the most romantic night of her young life, but frankly Roxanne couldn’t wait for it to be over. Wayne Scott was still as charming as ever, but there was no… Well, no spark. If only he had a motorbike, or something that made him stand out from his crowd of rich-boy friends. She sighed, and moodily ate another Pringle.

“Aw, don’t be sad. Maybe Bernard will spirit you away in a car that runs on long words.” Monique waved her hand, which was stuck in the Pringles tube.

“No, I think ours is a chaste, slightly maudlin love.” Roxanne put a hand to her chest, rolling her eyes dramatically. 

Monique made a face. “Sounds terrible.”

“It sort of is.” Roxanne admitted. “Shall we go to current events? For old time’s sake?”

“It’s true that I’m never going to be forced to care about the Republicans ever again.” Monique licked Pringle dust off her hand. “Come on, lets go.”


	4. Chapter Four

By the time Roxanne was suited and booted, she kind of felt like a soldier going to war. Part of her was even surprised when her mother handed her a little clutch purse instead of a machine gun. She had eventually gone to the internet for her dress, and bought a fifties-style dress in black and white and the little bows on her shoes were as cheerily cute as she thought they would be. Her father was standing at the bottom of the stairs with a camera, and he told her she looked ‘very grown-up’ in a very gruff voice, taking her photo on the stairs with her mother standing next to her, and when Wayne turned up in a proper stretch limo, he took another of them standing together at the door. Wayne was his usual charming self, smiling at her mother rakishly (and Roxanne really wasn’t sure how to feel about the giggling and blushing that caused) and shaking hands respectfully with her father (‘It’s an honour to meet you, sir’). For a moment she thought her father was going to blush and giggle as well, but he just said, “You look after her now,” in that same odd gruff voice. Then Wayne held out a corsage to her, consisting of a deep red rose with little sprigs of babies’ breath gathered round it. At that point her mother actually got a bit teary, so she dragged Wayne out of the door.

The limo was big and luxurious. In fact, Roxanne felt that if she ever had to explain luxury to a visiting alien, she would just take the limo and drive them round and round and round in it until they got the message. Wayne opened the little fridge and got out a bottle of champagne. He found a couple of luxurious champagne flutes and popped the bottle open.

“How did you get it?” she asked as he poured.

“Took it from my parent’s stash. They’ve got a wine cellar the size of the Grand Canyon.” Wayned passed her a glass.

“Are you sure? I mean, if the driver catches us...” Roxanne twisted her mouth. 

“Oh come on Roxie, it’s prom night! Live a little.” Wayne smiled at her. “Anyway, the driver is my parents’ chauffeur. He knows when to keep his mouth shut.”

“Ah…” Roxanne sipped anyway, feeling a little thrill of the forbidden, despite herself. It occurred to her that the champagne was probably the most interesting thing that Wayne had ever done.

There was a slightly awkward silence. Roxanne bounced experimentally on the luxurious leather seat and took in the luxuriously plush surroundings. She was already mentally composing an email to Bernard… _…sitting in the lap of luxury is curiously squeaky—the leather’s so new, any movement makes it creak like a ship under full sail…_

“Penny for them?” Wayne’s voice cut into her thoughts. Roxanne blinked and smiled.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Just enjoying the ride, huh?” Wayne said. He sounded a bit smug. Roxanne looked over at him and he laid an arm casually along the back of the seat, brushing the back of Roxanne’s neck and making her shiver, despite herself.

“It’s er, it’s some ride alright.” Roxanne agreed. He looked so pleased with himself. It should be illegal to look that pleased with yourself, she decided.

“Well, I like to show my girl a good time.” The casual possessiveness rankled. What if she wasn’t actually his girl? Roxanne cast about for another topic of conversation.

“Did you do _The Great Gatsby_ this year?” she ventured.

Wayne gave her a slightly odd look, which made the smog of smug lift slightly, to Roxanne’s relief. She thought it might suffocate her otherwise.

“Yes…”

“Oh.” Roxanne looked down at her glass. “What did you think?”

“Well, I liked the idea of like, awesome parties all the time, but what was with Gatsby and the green light? I mean, was he like a giant moth?”

Roxanne giggled dutifully. Wayne laughed as well, and he scooted closer. Him and his smog of smug. Roxanne suddenly felt a little trapped, and she wasn’t sure she liked that.

“Wow, is that a sun-roof?” 

She surged upright enthusiastically (and with only a touch of desperation) and prodded at some luxuriously shiny buttons till the roof opened. Luxuriously, of course. The night was mild but the speed of the car made the wind slap at Roxanne’s shoulders. As she enjoyed the breeze, they pulled up to the prom venue, and as they turned into the car-park she waved happily at a couple of people she knew. Then she dropped back into the luxurious interior and pulled out a little clam-shell mirror, to check her hair wasn’t too exciting. Wayne was smiling indulgently and Roxanne resisted the urge to shut the mirror on his nose.

“What, did I miss something?” she asked instead, trying to persuade the laws of physics that she was allowed to see the back of her own head with a small mirror and sheer willpower.

“You look fine. You’re an interesting girl, Roxie.”

“Oh?” The limo rolled luxuriously to a stop.

“Most girls would be falling into my arms before now.” Wayne leaned towards her. Roxanne raised her eyebrows, on the basis that her clutch was too far away to act as a sceptical barrier. He leaned back, smiling knowingly.

“You,” Wayne said, eyes lingering on her face till she felt herself blush, to her endless irritation, “are going to be a tougher nut to crack.”

Roxanne’s eyebrows threatened to raise themselves right off her face and out of the luxurious sun-roof.

“Maybe I’m not just a nut,” Roxanne suggested. Now it was Wayne’s turn to raise his eyebrows. Roxanne replayed her last sentence in her head and resolved to punish herself as soon as she possibly could.

“Shall we just go in?” She managed, finally.

“Sure.” Wayne seemed to feel more secure now, because he insisted on walking her in on his arm, rather like she was a trophy he had won. The ballroom that the Student Council had hired out was dimly lit by sconce lights around the edges, and a chandelier glittered above. A handful of lasers and a slightly tacky disco-ball lit up the dance-floor and a few people were already dancing, in various states of self-conscious. A couple of the corners were already occupied by her more hormonally-driven classmates, undaunted by the music that boomed out, heavy on the bass-line, effectively stopping any sort of conversation that couldn’t be carried out by standing an inch from the other person and screaming. Monique was a vision in shocking pink, her braids held up with matching beads. She ran over dragging Luscious Lucius, who kept staring at her like someone with a concussion. Roxanne presumed that must be what love looked like. 

“You look amazing!” Roxanne yelled at her friend.

Monique grinned and bobbed her head. “What?”

“YOU LOOK AMAZING!” Roxanne leaned into her friend, disengaging from Wayne.

“Thanks! Shoes are cute!” Monique bellowed back. She looked over at Wayne, who was waving at a few people, already distracted. “Let’s dance!”

Roxanne tugged on Wayne’s sleeve and he inclined his head towards her.

“I’m gonna go dance with Monique!”

“What?!” He bent down to her level, even though really, there was only a couple of inches between her and him,

“I’m gonna DANCE!”

“Oh!” Wayne still looked confused, so Roxanne pointed at the dance-floor and then at Monique. Then she rushed off with Monique (and Lucius bobbing along in her wake) before Wayne could say anything else.

“How’s it going with the dreamboat?!” Monique asked. Or at least, that’s what Roxanne figured she said. Closer to the dancefloor, the music pounded through their feet while small man with dark glasses on stood at the mixing desk nodding his head to the music and drinking out of a Solo cup.

“He has a limo the size of my house! And he got us champagne!”

“Classy!” Monique gave her a thumbs up.

Roxanne eyed the dance-floor, which was already heavy on the flailing and kicking, with a few determined couples slow-dancing to Monkey Wrench by the Foo Fighters.

“I’m not sure my insurance covers this kind of dancing!”

“Nope! You have to dance with your best friend! It’s the rules!” Monique dragged her onto the dance-floor. Roxanne always felt vaguely bad for dancing with Monique, who had done ballet for six years before deciding it was ‘for girls’ and giving it up for astronomy club. Even now, dressed in neon taffeta, she looked elegant. Roxanne kind of felt like a privet hedge next to a weeping willow. Still, she gamely bopped along, swishing the skirt of her dress and giggling as Monique whirled her round and round and round. Finally she held up her hands in defeat.

“I need a drink!” She mimed dying of thirst. Monique nodded, changing rhythm easily as the music switched.

“Get Lucius to come and dance!”

“Right!” Roxanne defensively flailed her way off the dance floor. Luscious Lucius was talking to some buddies by the buffet table, and when she came up he held up the punch ladle questioningly. She nodded, and he thoughtfully touched a finger to the side of the cut-glass punch-bowl and the punch froze over. Roxanne laughed when he frowned and broke the thin layer of ice with the ladle. He shrugged apologetically but she waved it off and put the cup to her cheek to cool it. The room had filled in earnest, and it was starting to get stuffy—she was willing to bet that without Lucius’ useful little talent, she’d be drinking luke-warm juice even now. Wayne was in a cluster of football types in one corner, and she was about to brace herself to go over and actually make conversation with her date, but then Junior was standing in front of her. Roxanne blinked, condensation from her drink spilling down her fingers.

“Roxanne! May I speak to you?!” He was wearing a rental tux, and it was a little bit big across the shoulders. The bowtie was undone, hanging round his neck like he thought he was Frank Sinatra. And yes, he was wearing the spiky army boots. “Please Roxanne?! It’s important to me!” The sincerity of his words were kind of lost by the fact he was bawling at her from about a foot away, but his face was unusually solemn. As someone who’d seen almost every fight and prank Junior had found himself part of in the last year, Roxanne knew he had a rubbish poker face. In fact, it was more snap than poker, if she was perfectly honest. 

“…Fine! But only because I like your bike!” To her eternal and crowing delight, he flushed a sort of violet colour that was almost complementary to the dark blue of his bowtie.

He lead them to the cloakroom, where they would be relatively undisturbed and more importantly, the music was abruptly turned into a dull roar that made Roxanne’s ears ring. It was full of coats, and for one hysterical moment Roxanne wondered if she wasn’t about to be pulled into Narnia. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that, Narnia had always seemed a deeply suspect place to her, even if you took the Christian allegory out of it. Junior didn’t say anything straight away, too busy staring at the toes of his boots.

“So what did you want? If it was to count the spikes on your shoes…”

Junior smiled at his boots and looked up, eyes skittering away from her face like he didn’t want to know what he would see. She tapped her foot a bit and he pulled a face indicating deep thought.

“Well, not that this isn’t fun, but—”

“I’m Bernard.”

Roxanne stopped dead. “What?”

Junior looked at her face but not at her eyes. It was kind of starting to get on her nerves.

“I’m Bernard. From the shool paper.”

“No you’re not.” Even as she said it, Roxanne realised how silly it sounded. How silly all of it sounded, like something out of a stupid movie…

“Am so. I—I didn’t… I thought… Telling you...” He made a little noise of irritation and reached into the rack of coats next to him. He must have found his jacket, because he retrieved a slightly battered plastic box. “I… I just wanted to give you this… I don’t think it’s a grand gesture…”

It was a corsage. An orchid with delicate forget-me-nots surrounding it.

“Orchids are my favourite,” Roxanne said, softly.

“I know. You told me. I just. I wanted to tell you that you’re the smartest person I know. And…” He trailed off again, staring at his boots.

Roxanne was still getting over the orchid.

“How did you know I liked orchids?” she asked, finally.

“Because you told me. You said you liked that they looked like a flower that wanted to fly.”

Roxanne stared at him some more. Then she closed her mouth and collected her thoughts. Junior was watching her cautiously. There was a little sadness there too, and she remembered a snippet from Bernard. `…I never really got into having friends… I’ve been to a lot of schools in my time. That’s why I’m so glad to have you…`

“Why didn’t you come?” she whispered.

Junior blinked. “I… What?” 

“Why?” Roxanne said it sharply and he flinched, and then reached out to her. At that moment, Wayne strolled in, taking in the tableau of Junior trying to grab his helpless date. Roxanne found some space to be cross with him as well. Did he think she couldn’t handle one skinny blue asshole? 

“Get your hands off her, you little creep!” He yanked Junior backwards by the collar of his rented tux. Junior made a little choking noise, but didn’t try and stop him. “Come on man, could you not just get the message?” Wayne shook him and Junior tugged himself out of his grasp, glaring up at him like Wayne couldn’t just roll him up and bounce him around the room like a basket-ball.

“Careful, it’s a rental,” he snapped. “And she’s not your girl—”

“Oh my god.” Roxanne couldn’t take it any more. She pulled off Wayne’s corsage with trembling fingers and threw it at him. He caught it, face so stupid and surprised she almost laughed.

“I’m not your girl, Wayne. I’m just not. And I never was, okay?”

Wayne blinked.

“Ha, see?” Junior started towards her and she wheeled on him.

“And you! Don’t even get me started on you!” And then to relieve her feelings, she flung her (unfortunately empty) cup at him and walked out. She stopped by Monique’s table to grab her bag.

“Roxanne, are you okay?”

“No.” Roxanne realised she was trying not to cry. It was too much, really it was. “Wayne and Bernard or whatever he’s calling himself are horrible and they’re going to make me cry on prom night and no one should cry on prom night.”

Monique looked over at Luscious Lucius wistfully, and then turned resolutely back to Roxanne.

“You need a ride?”

Roxanne suddenly realised she really loved Monique. Like, she would do anything for her kind of love. In her current maelstrom of anger, heartache and sore feet, she didn’t know how to say that without actually bursting into make-up ruining tears or coming off as a huge lesbian, something she sought to avoid, mainly because she wasn’t, but also because she didn’t want to unduly worry Lucius about his future prospects.

“No, I’m just going to head home.” Roxanne hugged her friend tight. “Thanks though, you’re an amazing friend.”

“Hey, yeah, I know that.” Monique gave her a squinty look. “Are you sure you don’t need a ride home?”

“No, I’ll walk to the bus-stop. I need to clear my head.”

“Right… You call me, okay?” Monique gave her one last decidedly neon squeeze, and Luscious Lucius did the same, although in more a pastel blue. Roxanne didn’t mind that so much—he really did live up to the name, after all, and it was very sweet of him to match Monique’s fashion period. Then she turned and left the prom.

 

She walked through the carpark watching her feet. The little bows were sort of cheering her up, like she had known they would, but there was an awful lot of up to be cheered, and they were very little bows. She couldn’t blame them. Boys were such dumb, ridiculous, over-blown, strutting…

“Roxanne?” It was Junior, his big boots thumping on the ground and the chains on the front of his jacket jingling softly as he ran towards her.

“Oh my god. What now?” Roxanne threw her hands up. “I’m not your girl either! Why do you people need to be—”

“I don’t want you to be my girl. I never wanted that.” Junior cut her off, panting a little. “I just…”

“What? What more could you possibly do to me?” Roxanne snapped. “Why are you here?”

Junior looked as though she’d smacked him in the face and he seemed to shrink at least two inches. Roxanne felt a little bad, despite herself—after all, he didn’t have an awful lot of inches to shrink.

“I… You still have my corsage.”

“You want it back?” Roxanne wondered whether her clutch would make a satisfying noise as it pounded him into the pavement. She wasn’t sure she even cared. The pavement was the important bit, after all.

“No! No. It’s yours. I don’t want it, and I won’t use it. Keep it. It belongs to you anyway.” Junior stepped back, warding her off.

Roxanne looked down at the plastic box that had miraculously made it out whole out of a dramatic exit.

“Was anything you said as Bernard actually true?” she asked, finally. At some point, she had stopped walking, but that wasn’t particularly important right now.

“All of it. Every word.” Junior said, immediately.

“Except the bit where you lied about who you were.”

“I never lied about who I was. You never asked!” He was starting to puff up again and Roxanne’s eyes narrowed.

“I asked plenty!”

“You never did. If you had said ‘Are you the devilishly handsome fellow with the excellent taste in clothing and books’ then I would have said yes!” He put his hands on his hips.

“Are you kidding me?” Roxanne was sorely tempted to kick him in the knee.

“I never had a friend before! I knew if you found out who I really was you’d just leave!”

It was unfair that he was the one who was cross. He wasn’t the one who had been lied to for the better part of six months by the boy voted Most Likely To Die In A Stupid Car Chase. “You didn’t.”

“Oh yeah? You’re saying that Roxanne Ritchi, prettiest, smartest girl in the whole shool, would have been seen dead with the bad boy who broke Ernie Arnold’s hand and filled the locker room with hot foam, nearly scalding the swim team to death and shrinking the football team uniforms?”

Roxanne was seething again. How dare he? He didn’t know her at all. He didn’t know the first thing about her.

“How dare you even dare to think you might know me, when everything you’ve ever said to me is a lie! I wouldn’t have accepted you? I don’t even know who YOU are!”

The hurt look was back, and Roxanne sort of wanted to smack it off his face. “I never—”

She overrode him. Letting him have any word in seemed unfair, considering. “And you if you think even for one moment you can just—”

“I don’t!” Junior yelled over her. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry for lying to you. I’m sorry for not coming for ice-cream. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you to prom in time!”

“No, you don’t get to yell at me—”

“Fine!” Junior yelled, and then waved his hands, trying to calm down. “Most of all, I’m sorry for hurting you. You—you were the closest thing I had to a friend, and I ruined it. And I’m sorry for that. And I always will be.” His voice echoed off the buildings around them.

There was a long silence following this little speech. Roxanne wasn’t sure what to say. She was still cross. Steaming, in fact, despite the chill of the night. But… Junior was staring at his boots, drawn into his leather jacket like someone expecting a blow. A car blew past, but neither of them seemed to notice it.

“I said don’t yell,” she managed. It had the right pitch and spin, but was kind of a lame comeback, really.

“You know what the worst part is? No one ever asks me how I broke Ernie Arnold’s finger.” Junior sighed, and stuck his hands in his pockets.

Curiosity got the better of her. “How did you break it?”

“I let him punch the wall instead of my face.”

There was another moment of silence following this. Roxanne shivered as the wind picked up, staring at the cute bows, which had been completely overwhelmed by the amount of up they had been required to provide, and were starting to droop. Apart from Junior, it was the most pathetic thing she’d seen all night.

“Here.” A heavy jacket landed round her shoulders. The leather was buttery under her fingers as she pulled it on properly, and it smelt of aftershave and motor oil. Roxanne may have still have been undecided on what she wanted to do next, what she was thinking and most of all what she was feeling, but she wasn’t about to freeze to death for the sake of her stupid pride. After all, she could leave this bit out when she related it to Monique later. The sleeves fell past her fingers.

“It looks good on you.” Junior offered.

“Shut up. You’re in disgrace.” Roxanne ordered. And he was, he really was.

“How long am I in disgrace for?” Junior kicked a pebble as they started to walk again.

“Until I say so.” Roxanne replied, with a little bit of a smile, despite herself.

“You sound like my fish.”

“Your… Fish? The one that says you’re too short?”

“Well, yes.” Junior said it like it should be obvious. “The others don’t talk. It’s rather sad really.”

“Ah, of course.”

“Do you want to meet him?”

“Your fish?”

“Well, yeah. I think you’d like him.” Junior was looking at her cautiously.

“Sure, why not?” Roxanne shrugged. Her heart was thumping under the leather. It was a wonder it couldn’t be heard banging at the inside of the jacket. Junior did a little victory dance and Roxanne rolled her eyes. Boys were so dorky sometimes.

“Don’t look so pleased, you’re still in disgrace.”

He stopped, looking abashed, and she took his hand, and squeezed it briefly. He looked down at her hand and then up at her like she was something he’d never seen before.

“I’ve never been in disgrace like this before.” He breathed.

“Don’t get used to it.”

“Oh.” Junior looked around. “Well, er, we should go back to the venue. I can call a cab from there.”

They walked in silence, holding hands. Roxanne’s mind whirled. Holding hands felt good—right even, but it was like there was this gap. There was Bernard, who wrote like an angel and made her feel like a heroine from a romantic novel, and then there was Junior, who made her clench up inside pleasantly, but was also well, Junior, public nuisance and well-known jerk. He had once made all the showers in the boy’s locker room spit white vinegar at random intervals, so the whole baseball team smelt like pickles for two days till they worked out what he’d done. And he had written ‘RULE THE WORLD’ across his ‘Future Plans’ sheet and refused to see the guidance counsellor. Roxanne knew what she wanted. She wanted to maybe go backpacking for a few months and then go to college, and become an investigative journalist in her own right. She had it all planned out, she always had. Junior’s future plans probably involved trying to stay out of prison. He called a cab, and stood next to her, the set of his shoulders screaming forced relaxation. His hand was a little sweaty, and he seemed to be holding his breath.

“What are you doing?” She gave him a faintly worried look.

“I want to remember exactly what this felt like in fifty years’ time. Even if we’re not together I want to be able to remember this happened.”

Roxanne flushed, and suddenly it felt like the gap between Junior and Bernard creaked shut some. She squeezed his hand and he looked at her, licking a corner of his mouth nervously. At that point the taxi came. He had to let go of her hand for her to get in the car, and after that neither of them really seemed to know what to do about it. They sat at opposite corners of the back-seat, looking out of their respective windows. Roxanne didn’t mind too much, without his long fingers wrapped round hers it was easier to think. If Bernard wasn’t a lie, what did that make him? A sort of curtain across the truth? Surely that was worse...

“You er, you’d better be quiet when you get in, I don’t want to wake my Dad up.”

“What about your Mum?”

“Oh, they divorced before I was born. It’s just me and him.” Junior shrugged in a way that suggested the subject was closed. Roxanne wondered about that. What sort of family did someone have that meant they didn’t want to talk about them? She imagined a big hairy guy with a stained wife-beater. He probably didn’t work, and drank too much whilst zoned out in front of the television. Maybe he hit Junior. That would make sense, the whole rebel without a cause thing... They probably lived in a dilapidated old cottage or tumble-down trailer, living off food-stamps and whatever money Junior scraped together...

The cab stopped and Roxanne blinked.

“Are you asleep?” Junior asked her, hesitantly.

“No, just thinking.” She smiled at him, and he opened the door for her, taking her hand to help her out.

“What about?”

“Nothing really.” Roxanne hedged. She looked around as Junior paid the driver. They were in a well-kept piece of suburbia, the sort where the wife cooked big Sunday dinners full of love and guilt, and the men washed their cars every weekend. There were even white picket fences. They were pulled up outside a Cape Cod-style cottage, with a garage tacked onto one side and a blue Crown Victoria parked on the drive. The lawn was immaculate, the hedge carefully tended and there were even roses and honeysuckle creeping over the little deck, trailing down over the swinging chair, and even in the yellow light of the streetlamps, it looked respectable.

“All set?” Junior made it a question, alert like he was waiting for her to bolt.

“Is this your place?” she asked.

“Uh-huh. Er, do you want to come in?” Junior almost held out his hand to her, but stopped himself. That little gesture made Roxanne ache a little inside. It was so frustrating, these feelings that seemed to come from nowhere for no reason, but at least she knew how to fix this one. She took his hand.

“Yes, please.” She smiled at him, and he blinked before smiling back, a little uncertain, like he wasn’t used to it.

They slipped in. Roxanne took her shoes off on the hardwood flooring, and Junior toed off his boots. He didn’t switch a light on, presumably to not wake his father, and what Roxanne could see lit by the orange-y light outside was mainly comfortably shadowy furniture and pictures reflecting more orange into the room. He opened a door, and wincing as it creaked very faintly, lead her down some concrete stairs, so cold they felt a little damp on her bare feet. She felt like she was going to come out on a different world. Perhaps they’d get to the bottom and there’d be a tiny door and a bottle marked _‘Drink me’_. When they did hit the bottom step after about seventeen cold cement stairs, she hesitated. Junior looked at her, head tilted in the gloom.

“You okay? The floor’s warmer in there, I promise.” He chuckled weakly. They both knew that wasn’t the reason she’d hesitated.

“The door’s bigger than I thought it would be,” Roxanne said, truthfully. He gave her an odd look, and opened it anyway, flipping on the light. 

The basement room was pretty big, and thickly carpeted against the cold. There was a daybed on one side of the room, with a shelf above it, mainly dominated by a long tank filled with water. Then there was a computer on a desk, and in the other corner, another desk with papers all over it, overflowing into a bookcase which in turn, was overflowing onto another bookcase. The other half of the room was dominated by a workbench that looked like a junkyard had eaten a chemistry lab and thrown up. A fish-tank of brightly coloured tropical fish sat on a shelf above the workbench and a few glass bulbs hung from the ceiling.

“...Are those lights?” She asked pointing at them, since out of the many questions she had, that seemed like the best place to start.

“No, they’re called brainbots. But Dad won’t let me keep them on when I’m out, ‘cause they eat his shoes.”

Roxanne looked up at the lights again. Now she got used to them, they did seem to have well, teeth. “They eat his shoes?” 

“Well, they chew them up. They’re only puppies.”

He flicked the long wires coming out of the bottom of one of them fondly and pulled her further into the room. It was warmer than she thought it would be. He tugged her across to the bed and for a moment Roxanne didn’t know what she thought but instead he just tapped on the tank above the bed.

“Minion, we have a visitor!” 

Nothing happened.

“Sorry, he’s kind of a sound sleeper. Minion!” He tapped insistently. Roxanne winced. She was pretty sure fish didn’t like that sort of thing, but nevertheless there was movement and neon tubing lit the tank up, revealing a big sand-castle shaped thing, and what was definitely an angler fish without the light. Roxanne blinked.

“Roxanne, this is Minion. Minion, Roxanne. See? She’s just like I said!” He was practically bouncing on the bed by now. Minion stared at her, which was actually a little disconcerting. It was almost a considering look. Junior grinned from one to another, and Roxanne almost laughed as he jumped off the bed. 

“Say hi back, then!” Junior dragged her closer, and she couldn’t say no, really. 

“Hi, Minion. Er, how’s it going?” Roxanne finger-waved at him with the arm wearing the corsage.

The fish gave her another long look and Roxanne backed off a step. Those were big teeth, but Junior was already spinning off to another part of the room. She looked around, awkwardly, and finally something on the workbench caught her eye.

“Is that your bike engine?” 

“Yeah...” Junior poked at it with a frown.

“What’s wrong with it?” Roxanne followed him.

“Don’t get too close, you’ll get your dress dirty. And nothing’s wrong with it, I’m just making it better. Dad won’t let me take it out again.” He pouted, and poked at it harder. The whole thing rocked, and Roxanne backed off as little flakes of dried oil came off it.

“Well, you shouldn’t go creeping around a girl’s house. Any girl.” Roxanne clarified this.

“I didn’t go to just any girl.” Junior protested and Roxanne felt herself blush, despite a part of her insisting that yes this was all very interesting but really, she was still very angry indeed. 

“What’s this?” She pointed at something that looked like satellite and a water pistol had babies.

“That’s my de-ray, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention that one to anyone. I told them I’d never made a working model.”

“A... De-ray?” Roxanne asked, sceptically. 

“Uh-huh. I wanted to carry on working on it without them sticking their nose in. They’re really quite intolerable.” Junior pouted for a moment, turning the thing over in his hands.

“...Them?” Great, actually a complete and utter paranoid lunatic. 

“Yeah...” Junior seemed to realise what he was saying and pointed it at a moth-eaten stuffed giraffe toy. “Let me show you.” He pulled the trigger, and the giraffe disappeared and was replaced by a small blue cube. Roxanne gasped, she couldn’t help herself.

“How did you do that?”

“It’s the dehydrator setting.” Junior unearthed a beaker of water with a glass rod in it. “See?” And he flicked a drop of water on the cube. It mushroomed back out into the giraffe, which frankly looked a bit reproachful about the whole thing, something Roxanne could understand, feeling pretty reproachful herself.

“And you made that?” She still wasn’t sure she believed it.

“Took me a whole summer to get the decoupage setting right,” Junior replied proudly.

“You made it. In your basement. You didn’t get it from the internet or anything?” Perhaps he was lying. 

“Nope. Well, some of the parts, yeah, but only the things I couldn’t get from the hardware store.” Junior put the gun down carefully and picked up another thing. It looked like a flower. 

“I know what that is. NASA developed them, don’t they? How did you get one?”

“Well, I made it.” Junior looked put-out. “I hate it when they decide they had to invent it.”

Definitely a pathological liar then. Roxanne tried not to let on how disappointed she was. Mind you, what could she expect from a guy who spent a whole year pretending to be someone else?

“Hey, Junior? That you, kid?” A gruff voice called from upstairs. Roxanne stiffened. What if the house was a facade, and now some white-collar bully was going to come downstairs and—

“Yeah Dad, it’s me.” Junior sighed as someone pushed the top door open all the way and made their way downstairs. 

“What’re you doing, boy? Sounds like you’re talking to someone...” Junior’s father trailed off as he came into the room. Roxanne smiled, awkwardly. Junior’s father was tall, true, but trim, an older man who maybe went jogging in the evenings with a group of neighbours or something. Golf maybe. He was wearing pyjama bottoms, but they were clean and matched the button-down pyjama top. He was even wearing honest-to-goodness slippers and a matching tartan dressing gown. He looked like he should be enjoying an active retirement playing bridge and keeping up the garden, not looking after a eighteen-year-old delinquent. 

“Dad, this is Roxanne. Roxanne, this is my Dad.” Junior suddenly looked nervous. Roxanne politely stepped forward and shook the older man’s hand.

“Pleased to meet you, sir.”

“Please, call me James.” He smiled, and it was genuine, like an uncle who’d suddenly come upon a favourite niece. The look he turned on Junior was slightly less friendly. “Tell me, son of mine, how exactly you were planning on this lovely young lady getting home?”

“Getting home? Well, er...” Roxanne wondered if she was blushing. Had he thought...? He’d better not. She turned round to tell him as much and he gulped. “Maybe my bike?”

“Without it’s engine?” James rolled his eyes. “I’ll take her home.”

“No, Dad...” Junior almost whined. Roxanne gave him slitty eyes and he took a step back, confused. Boys were all the same really, she thought with a scowl, and turned back to James.

“A ride would be really good, thanks.”

“I’m gonna get dressed first then. Last thing I need is one of Metro City’s finest stopping me in my pyjamas with a lovely young lady in the car with me.”

Roxanne remembered a rumour that had gone around when Junior had first started school. 

“Is your Dad really the prison warden for the Prison for the Criminally Gifted?” she asked, as James made his way back upstairs, grumbling a little under his breath. 

“Yeah...” Junior replied, despondently. He held the door open for her and switched on the upstairs light. The front-room was warmly decorated in orangey tones with a television on one wall, and plenty of pictures on the wall. One of them showed Junior, younger and if possible, even skinnier than he was, holding a fish in both hands, grinning up at the camera. He was in a boat, on a lake. 

“Catch and return fishing,” he volunteered, following her line of sight. “Minion got upset at the idea of anything else.”

“Of course...” Roxanne muttered. Other pictures showed him by the same lake, crouching to poke at the ground with a stick, standing next to his father covered in dirt but holding a squirrel proudly. His father looked... Well, pleased Junior was pleased, was the best Roxanne could come up with. 

“We go to the lake every summer. There’s like a hut and stuff. It’s pretty neat.” An idea came to him and he turned round eagerly. “Maybe this year, you could come too!”

“Yeah, maybe...” Her lack of enthusiasm must have showed, and she kind of felt bad at the way he deflated.

“Look, Roxanne, I know I... I haven’t behaved the best. But...” He stared at his socks. Roxanne folded her arms, and as Junior looked up, James came back in, wearing jeans and a polo shirt. He pulled on a coat and picked up his keys. 

“Are you ready to go?” 

“Yes, please.” Roxanne favoured Junior with one last glance, which was a goddamn favour as well. She’d never known it was possible to feel so many stupid emotions over one person, and frankly she’d almost prefer not to.

James didn’t speak till they were in the car and pulling out of the drive.

“So, Roxanne. How do you know Junior?” 

Roxanne winced, but luckily she’d sort of thought this question might come up. “We have class together. And I edit the paper.”

“You’re that Roxanne, are you? I read your editorials sometimes. They’re pretty interesting.” 

“Oh, do you think so? I mean, er... Thanks.” Roxanne fidgeted. “I didn’t know Junior brought home the school paper.”

“He does when he’s in it—I think he put them towards his college application.” James sounded proud then. 

“What about his... Inventions?” Roxanne asked.

“Those too.” James said, but now he sounded guarded. “The ones that are patented, anyway. Have you two been er...”

“Friends.” Roxanne supplied, helpfully. It was closest to the truth, in any case.

James seized on the word gratefully. “Friends... Long?”

“Well, for a while. Mainly by email, you know, with the editing and things...” Roxanne stared out of the window. 

“That’s good. It’s... School’s not been easy for him, I think.” Roxanne blinked. That wasn’t the sort of thing your friend’s parent usually said to you, especially when the friend was an extra-ability kid. Roxanne had noticed that those parents tended to try harder than most to stay positive, although she couldn’t say why.

“The extra... Extra-abilities, they’re tougher to live with than people make out. Especially when you look... Different.” James was gesticulating with one hand, trying to encompass all the ways one could look... Different. 

“I’ll bet,” Roxanne said, politely. What else was there to say? 

James rubbed his forehead, smiling ruefully. “I took him to one of those camps for extra-ability kids one year, you know? You get all the kids with similar abilities and they can play sports or whatever. And I took him to the one where all the kids have like, well, super-smarts.”

Roxanne smiled at the old-fashioned ‘super’, and James chuckled a little himself, shaking his head.

“He came home after a week. Got himself kicked out because it was ‘boring’. Something about calculus for dummies, I don’t know. Sometimes it’s like he’s talking another language, you know?”

Roxanne thought of Bernard’s emails on Shakespeare. “Yeah, I know that.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I love him very much, but... It’s not easy.”

Roxanne didn’t say anything to that. She wasn’t sure what she should say. This was an adult, talking to her like she was another adult, about someone who was the nebulous in a twisted knot of emotion she wasn’t even sure had a proper name. Now she had something else to think about. Being friends with Bernard had been easy, she could switch off the computer or walk away from her phone. Junior though, was different. She imagined being stuck with that intellect always, constantly trying to keep up...

“I suppose what I’m saying is... Don’t... Don’t get his hopes up, you know?” James broke the silence first. Roxanne jumped at the sound of his voice.

“No... No, I won’t.” Roxanne said, truthfully. She wasn’t sure what her own hopes were yet. 

 

James dropped her off, and she let herself into the nighttime hush of her room. When she went to get undressed, she realised she was still wearing the leather jacket, and she sat down at her vanity, still wearing it, looking at herself anywhere but in the eye. She realised part of her had been hoping that she would never have to talk to Junior again, that she could just write this off as a painful teen experience and move on with her life. Then she saw herself in the mirror, make-up smudged, looking tired and a little drawn. This was actually stupid. She pulled the jacket off and hung it over the back of her chair. Then she washed off her make-up, put on her pyjamas and hung her dress up. She got into bed, and lay in the dark staring at her ceiling. Really, the best thing to do would be to walk away, she had the whole of college, hell, the rest of her life. There would be other boys. She could return his jacket to the school office on Monday and then she could just forget about it, and him. Go to college and have a normal life as a hard-hitting investigative journalist, with a year’s backpacking for good measure. Right. She rolled over, closing her eyes tight. She could remember the feel of the leather jacket settling round her shoulders, the look on his face when she had taken his hand in hers. She curled up, scowling to herself. 

It was a long time before she fell asleep.


	5. Chapter Five

Roxanne woke late-ish the next morning, stretched and rolled over. There was a leather jacket on the back of her desk chair, which was weird, because that wasn’t her thing, really... Then it came back. She rolled on her back and sighed, before rolling the rest of the way off her bed, pulling on the ratty old dressing-gown that meant she wasn’t leaving the house, possibly ever again, and shuffled downstairs. Her mother and father golfed on Sunday mornings, so she fixed herself breakfast and ate as she checked her emails. She was almost disappointed there was nothing from Bernard before she remembered. She went to shut her computer down in a huff when an ad on Facebook caught her attention. It was for the little flower thing she’d seen on Junior’s work bench. She paused. A proper investigative journalist wouldn’t let a little thing like a lie get between her and the truth, right? A few minutes with Google, and she had found out the little flower thing was actually a kind of emergency battery, which you put in your bag and it gained energy from the movement of rolling about in your pack. Then you could plug it into things for a couple of hours of radio, light, or Gameboy. Only a little more digging and she found the patent. Roxanne blinked and then glared. It actually had Junior’s name on it, which was almost more irritating than if it hadn’t been there at all. Her phone rang and she almost fell off her chair.

“What happened?” Monique demanded.

“What do you mean, what happened?” Roxanne picked herself up off the floor and sat on the edge of her bed. Stupid Monique. She’d almost died.

“Well, I actually felt bad about abandoning you in your heart-ache for a PG-shading-to-R night with the Luscious Lucius so I followed you out. Just in time to see you, yes you, stepping into a cab with the Blue Meanie.” 

“...Are you pointing dramatically?” Roxanne asked.

“...No.” Monique said, grumpily. “And don’t change the subject.”

“Fine. Yes. I went back to his place.”

“Good lord, what on earth possessed—”

Roxanne told her everything. The cloak-room, the jacket, the suspiciously normal father and even the flower battery thing. Monique was quiet for a long moment after that, and then she popped the tab on a can of soda.

“...So you didn’t kiss him?”

“No!” 

“You’re doing the big revelation part of the story all wrong, really.” Monique said, meditatively. “Are you going to return the jacket?”

Roxanne flopped back on her bed and stared at it upside down. “Well, yes. It is the tackiest thing ever.” 

“It really is. Are you going to talk to him about it?”

“Why would I?”

“Because you spent the last hundred years pining after this Bernard guy. I mean, I can kind of see why he would hide it. It wouldn’t do much for his rep as the ultimate bad-boy if he was caught writing girly stuff about first names, would it?”

“But he never really was the ultimate bad-boy.” Roxanne pointed out reasonably.

“Well, no, but that’s what boys are like. It’s like how Lucius likes to make out he has mastery over ice.”

“Does he?”

“Well, sort of. As long as there’s moisture in the air. He’s really less ice-master and more like one of those fridge-freezers that dispense ice if anyone can be bothered to fill it up.” Monique admitted, cheerily. Roxanne giggled.

“So what are you going to do?” Monique was flicking the tab on her soda with a metallic tink-tink noise that was singularly annoying.

“What do you think I should do?”

“I think you should return his jacket. I mean, just because he’s a big jerk in real life doesn’t mean he is all the time. Like, what does he really have to gain with the whole Bernard schtick anyway?”

“Wayne...” 

“I don’t think this has anything to do with Wayne Scott, not really. I mean, if I was gonna go after Wayne Scott, I’d hit him closer to home. Like, right in the football team, or something.” 

Roxanne raised her eyebrows. That was deep, for Monique.

“Don’t look so surprised.”

Roxanne’s eyebrows raised higher. “How did you know?”

“How do you think?” Monique hung up.

Roxanne stared at the phone. Monique was so annoying. She really needed a new best friend. One that just knew the answers when she asked them, ideally before she asked them. She looked at the jacket hanging innocuously over the back of the chair and came to a decision.

`From: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`To: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`Date: 9th June`  
`Subj: At least I get why you never gave me your number now`

`Dear Junior,`

`I realise I still have your jacket. I’m going to the mall today, I could meet you there and give it to you there. Say three, by the fountain?`

`Otherwise I’ll drop it at the school office on Monday.`

`Roxanne`

 

`From: bernardshoutsblue@metmail.com`  
`To: roxiemoxie@metmail.com`  
`Date: 9th June`  
`Subj: `

`Dear Roxanne,`

`I would consider it a great and wondrous kindness if you would meet with me today.`

`Your,`  
`Junior`

Roxanne's mouth twisted when she read the last part. She wasn't sure Junior could call himself 'her' anything, because he wasn’t really. She scrubbed her face, and went to take a shower.

 

Two fifty-five pm found her sitting in the mall carpark with a white-knuckle grip on the wheel of the Redoubtable Charger. The leather jacket sat on the seat beside her and appeared to be judging her, or something.

"What? I'm going to return you, jeez..." She looked down at her gypsy-style blouse and shorts. Maybe shorts were a bit much? He might think she wasn't taking the meeting seriously. 

"Oh get a grip. You're returning a damn jacket, woman..." She checked her lipstick in the mirror in the same way Custer had probably checked his moustache before Wounded Knee and opened the car door. 

The mall was crowded with harassed mothers and noisy kids, with the occasional clump of school kids eating mall food and comparing purchases. Roxanne barely noticed, too occupied with the way her heart felt like it was going to can-can its way right out of her chest and away. Her phone went off and she fumbled it out of her pockets.

"Are you nervous?" Monique demanded.

"Well..."

"No good. He should be nervous of you. Lucius agrees. You need to show him Roxanne Ritchi ain't no tutorial level."

"Tutorial level?" Roxanne asked bemusedly. The fountain loomed in her vision.

"That's my girl. Now, call me after and let me know how it goes."

Junior was sitting on the edge of the fountain. He picked a handful of pennies out of the water (a sign assured shoppers their donations went to the Make-A-Wish Foundation) and tossed them back in. He was wearing his army boots and a denim jacket with patches safety-pinned to it.

"Right..."

"Is he there?" Monique asked.

"Yes." Roxanne whispered and then wondered why she did.

"Well, why are you talking to me? Be aloof, be a goddess. Make sure he knows you're in charge!" And she hung up.

Junior spotted her before she got to him and waved with one hand, popping his earbuds out of his ears with the other. 

"Hi... Roxanne. How are you?"

Roxanne forgot about aloof. "I'm pretty good."

"Good," he sounded slightly breathless. There was a moment of awkward silence.

"I—" Junior started to say.

"You—" Roxanne started to say.

They both stopped, and stared at each other mutely.

"Please, you first," Junior said.

"I bought your jacket." Roxanne proffered it as proof that she had indeed brought his jacket.

"Thank you," Junior replied, gravely. He took it and took off the denim one before putting the leather one back on. 

"Well, er..." Roxanne was suddenly annoyed. On the phone last night, she and Monique had come up with hundreds of blistering little put-downs to wither his very soul. But now she couldn't think of any of them.

"Roxanne. I really have behaved abominably. My research suggests I should try to even the balance with an offering."

"W-what?" Roxanne had a sudden image of Junior standing over a lamb at an altar in the Aztec vein. Possibly with Minion in a white lab-coat taking notes.

"Well. I was thinking I could buy you ice-cream. As a, an apology. For ice-cream tragically and foolishly uneaten."

It was on the tip of her tongue to say no, to just sweep out and leave him there. It was the least he deserved. The very least.

But she found herself saying yes. 

 

Sal's Sundaes was almost uniformly full on Sunday, but Junior seemed to have a sixth sense about such things and dove into the crowd without hesitation. He finally popped up above the crowd and flailed his skinny blue arms enthusiastically. Roxanne considered ignoring him, but he'd managed to get a booth seat, and he looked so pleased that he'd managed to do so she felt like saying no would have been the same as stealing a puppy and then taking away its bone. She slid in, and he popped up again almost immediately. 

“What would you like? I have to buy it.” 

Roxanne almost laughed at his earnest expression, but managed to quash it.

“Hot fudge. With nuts and sprinkles please.”

“A wise choice.” Junior winked and slid out into the crowd. Roxanne put her head in her hands. It was supremely unfair of him to be cute when she was going to kick his scrawny lying ass. Maybe she could kick it a little bit? Sort of on a part-time basis... Maybe if she got a spreadsheet she could get Monique to make a timetable or a bill or something. She groaned and beat her head off the table a little, resting her forehead on the formica.

“Are you okay? I got sundaes.”Junior put them down in front of her, looking concerned.

“Better for ice-cream!” Roxanne coughed to hide the slightly hysterical edge to her voice and dug in. There was silence for a bit, scented by fudge and embarrassment.

“So...” Roxanne said, finally.

“Look...” Junior began.

“Sorry, you first.”

“No, please, you first.” Junior waved his spoon politely.

“Were you in trouble with your Dad for bringing me home?” 

Junior looked almost a little disappointed this.

“No, not really. I’ve never done it before. He just told me to go to bed.” 

“Oh.” What had she been expecting? James had seemed more resigned than anything, and in any case, what was she going to say if Junior had replied ‘yes, he beat me viciously in the torso, so no one can see the bruises, and locked me in the spider-cupboard without food for a day’. Especially since he wasn’t in a spider-cupboard, he was sitting opposite her.

“What about you?” Junior asked, politely.

“My folks knew I’d be home late.” Roxanne’s phone buzzed.

Wayne: Sry the champagne wasnt to ur taste. Hope ur night turned out okay. xo

She found herself blushing again and rolled her eyes. Honestly, boys could be so... 

“Is everything okay?” Junior’s face was pleasantly blank, but Roxanne could practically taste his tension. Or maybe it was hers. She put the phone away. 

“It’s nothing, just er... Just Wayne.”

Junior’s face fell. “Oh, right.” It was like someone had stepped on the world’s tiniest violin. Well, someone, it was pretty clear who the tromping giant was. Roxanne had to resist the urge to yell fee-fi-fo-fum. 

“What is it with you two anyway?” she asked, suddenly. Call it a reporter’s nose for a story.

“What do you mean?” Junior was suddenly on guard, which was interesting.

“Why are you always you know, doing things... To each other?”

“Because he’s a big jerk who should leave people alone.” Junior played with his sundae, looking like he did when Ms Hardick handed back another assignment, shoulders slumped, about one foot-tap from a petulant sigh.

“Well, if you’re going to be like that about it...” Roxanne started to gather her things.

“What are you doing?” Junior sat up, startled.

“If you’re just going to continue to mess me about...” Roxanne checked for her car-keys.

“I’m not— I never—” he protested, all wide-eyed innocence that made Roxanne want to smush her sundae on his face.

“No, you lied to me for a whole year. A whole year! And you think ice-cream and puppy-dog eyes will make up for that?”

“I just don’t see why it has to be your business!” Junior snapped.

“Because you owe me for this.” Roxanne snapped right back at him.

They glared at each other for a moment, and Roxanne snapped her purse shut, decisively.

“No, wait... I’ll tell you...” Junior sighed, and Roxanne slid back behind her sundae. 

“We grew up in the same area, and for... For quite a while, we were the only kids like us, you know, extra abilities, sort of thing... And I guess for a while, I thought you know, we’d be friends and stuff, but...” Junior gave a sad little shrug. “I mean, I guess you can hardly blame him, right? Being extra-ability is tricky enough without making friends with the weird blue kid who blew up the art class.”

Roxanne was outraged. It was grade school bullying at it’s most pure and simple. “That’s horrible. If you had gone to my school...”

“I do go to your shool. And this is the first proper face-to-face conversation we’ve ever had.”  
He didn’t snap it, or shout it. Just dropped the weight of the fact in the rubber sheet of the conversation.

Junior broke the silence first. “I don’t want you to feel like you should forgive for what I did.”

“Good, because...” Roxanne began, clinging to the shreds of her anger.

“But I want you to consider why I did it.” 

They sat in silence for a while then. It was so unfair. Why did he have to be right? On the one hand, you only had to look at the guy to see that they would have nothing in common. Why would she speak to him, one trouble-maker in a school full of people she’d known since freshman year? But on the the other hand, why wouldn’t she? She knew she liked him, or at least, the part of him she had emailed constantly over the last few months. She even kind of had a soft spot for the part of him that would get into a flaming row with Ms Hardick and storm out of the class. He was staring at her over the top of his sundae glass with those absurdly big green eyes, and a sly part of her that sounded oddly like Monique whispered _And you like those too, don’t you?_

“Oh shut up,” she muttered at a sprinkle in the bottom of her glass.

“I’m sorry?” Junior tilted his head. 

“Nothing.” Roxanne ate the last mouthful of sundae and came to a conclusion. She made a show of checking her watch, and realised that she never wore a watch.

“Do you have to go?” Junior asked, sagging a little inside the leather coat. You could only tell because the coat wrinkled a little, sort of like a turtle shell in that respect. The worst part was, he didn’t really look surprised, more like he had been waiting for her to realise she had to be somewhere else. The realisation of that made Roxanne wince, internally. While Junior had a lot of milage to make up, he wasn’t the only one who’d need to run.

“Er, actually, I was wondering if you wanted to catch a movie?” 

His face lit up, and Roxanne couldn’t help grin back. Say what you like about him, his enthusiasm was always infectious. Like the measles. Roxanne squashed the aside from Monique and took his hand as they walked across the mall.

 

The only thing that was showing at that moment was the latest animated offering, and frankly, Junior was more excited about it than the little kids in front of them. They bought popcorn, because Junior thought it was necessary, but by the time their turn at the concession stall came, he was already flailing at the claw machine in the corner. Roxanne smiled slightly embarrassedly at the usher, paid, and mooched over to him nibbling popcorn.

“What’re you doing?” 

“Winning you a toy.” Junior didn’t look round, intent on the stuffed SpongeBobs and Hello Kitties behind the glass. Roxanne didn’t like SpongeBob or Hello Kitty, but no one had ever tried to win her anything before. As she watched, he grunted in frustration and fed another quarter into the machine. He had the look Monique sometimes got when an equation didn’t solve itself first time, something she’d once lost her to for for three days. 

“The movie’s going to start,” she volunteered.

“Yeah, in a minute, I almost got... Augh!” Junior fumbled for another quarter.

“No, come on, we’ve paid and everything.” Roxanne tugged on his sleeve as the claw slipped off the bulbous white head of Hello Kitty.

“But I almost have it...” Junior whined. He fumbled in his pocket again. “Er, do you have a quarter?”

“Movie, now.” Roxanne chivvied him along, trying not to laugh. 

 

The movie wasn’t the best. The kids in the audience seemed pleased enough, but Roxanne was pretty sure she could hear the parents souls dying, or conceiving of massive salt traps for the animated snail. Junior had bounced his way through the adverts, whispering to her about the movies. Finally, she had taken his hand, slightly sticky from popcorn, and told him to shh. To her astonishment it worked. Then about five minutes later she had looked over, he was fast asleep. She squeezed his hand experimentally. He didn’t move. He was even drooling, which lead Roxanne to wonder what the correct etiquette was when your date (and there was no point in lying to herself, it was a date) drooled on his leather jacket. At least it would probably wipe off easily. His hand was still in hers, the thin fingers relaxed a little but still clutching at hers, and she sighed. This was easily the weirdest date she’d ever been on. Not the worst, but definitely the weirdest. Really, the worst part was that the movie was so bad, and she felt bad waking him up, which left no choice but to try and power through it. If this was the sort of thing Hal had to put up with on a weekly basis, she could almost forgive his review of _Captain America_. A few times, she nudged Junior, who would sort of flap a little, and settle down some more. It almost made her feel a little bad, especially after his head slumped funny and she elbowed him in the ear. At the end of the movie, she tugged on him until he sort of looked up. 

“Huh?”

“I said, the movie’s over. You fell asleep.”

“Oh... S’ry...”

Roxanne dropped his hand and put her hands on her hips, looking down at him.

“How are you getting home?”

“Bus, I guess.” Junior pulled himself upright and rubbed his eyes like a child. Roxanne was irritated to find it was cute as all hell, especially since she’d had to pay for the popcorn. 

“Should I walk you to the bus-stop?”

“That’d be nice.” Junior yawned and stood up, slumping towards the exit. 

 

They didn’t talk much as they walked through the mall. Junior was barely shambling along. Roxanne was starting to feel a little alarmed. Perhaps he was sick? Would letting him go home on his own in this state therefore, be a little immoral? What if he missed his stop and wound up in Canada? He’d have to join a patisserie or smuggle himself out under William Shatner or something. And he hadn’t taken French in school, because their school only offered Spanish. 

“Come on, I’ll give you a ride home.”

“You don’t have to,” Junior mumbled.

“Yes, I do. I don’t want you to have to learn how to make maple syrup torte.”

“IHOP?”

 

Junior sat in the car, and fell asleep. Roxanne wasn’t sure what else she had been expecting really, but she put the radio on anyway. There wasn’t a car in the driveway at Junior’s house; presumably his Dad was out grocery shopping or playing golfing or something, but she still parked on the street. By now, Junior wasn’t actually awake as such, but when she tugged on him he followed. She had thought to get him into the basement, in a strictly non-psycho-murderer way, but, after fishing his keys out of his jacket pocket, she actually made it as far as the couch before she sort of gave up. He flopped down like he had no bones. She let him, and he smiled sleepily at her and she rolled her eyes because no one should be that cute. Especially when they still had drool on their lapel. She found a throw rug on one of the comfy armchairs and draped it over him, tucking it in, and then holding her breath in case... In case of something, she kissed him just above the eyebrow. He stirred,murmuring her name, and she stood up so fast she felt a bit dizzy, blushing hotly in the cool of the house. The front door clunked and she jumped about three miles in the air, and by the time she had unplastered herself from the ceiling, James had come in, wearing golf shoes and carrying a grocery bag. He took in the scene.

“...So... Did it go really well, or really badly?” he asked, finally, moving through to the kitchen. Roxanne opened her mouth, and then shut it again. He didn’t look round, peaceably putting milk in the fridge and ice-cream in the freezer. It wasn’t until he shut the freezer door so hard a magnet fell off that she managed to marshal her thoughts again.

“It was okay... We had ice-cream... er, but he fell asleep in the movie, so I gave him a ride...” She twisted her fingers together.

“Ice-cream?” James stopped putting eggs in the little egg thingy in the fridge door and laughed. “You’ll have to excuse my son, Roxanne. He’s lactose intolerant.”

“He is?”

“Was he quite... Bouncy, before he fell asleep?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Roxanne wondered if she should sit down or stay where she was. 

“Yeah, it’s the ice-cream. A side-effect of the... Extra abilities, I suppose.”

Roxanne nodded, even though she hadn’t known an allergy could be considered an extra-ability. Behind them, Junior shifted, and snored a little.

“He’ll be out for the next couple hours. Are you alright to get home?” James cast a fond and slightly irritated look at the couch.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

“If my son was conscious, I’m sure he’d apologise for being so rude. I’m sorry the date didn’t go like you thought it would...”

“Nothing with him has gone like I thought it would.” Roxanne’s eyes widened and she put a hand to her mouth, surely she hadn’t said that out loud. That would be incredibly rude, surely. But James grinned at her, and it wasn’t just a polite, this girl is the friend of my son smile, it was a full on, we have an understanding here smile. Roxanne blinked. This family was so weird. 

“And there you have it!” James waved a hand. Junior started snoring in earnest.

“I’d better go...” Roxanne waved at James as she backed out. He came to the door with her, holding a bag of cookies.

“Thank you for bringing him home,” James said, as he held the door open for her. He looked at her very hard, like he was trying to find something. Roxanne smiled nervously, and backed off to the car.

 

When she got home, she found Junior’s denim jacket on her back seat.

The next day, Roxanne met Junior under her favourite oak-tree to return his denim jacket. He took it shame-facedly and put it in his rucksack.

"I'm so sorry about yesterday..." He trailed off, fiddling with his bag. 

"Lactose intolerant, huh?" 

“Yeah... I kind of... Forgot... I’m really sorry.” Did he know he looked like a puppy when he gave her that look? “Can you forgive me? I could take you out for pancakes...”

“Pancakes?” Roxanne started to giggle a little. Pancakes was not a word any boy should say whilst looking earnestly into your eyes.

“...Or something else! Whatever you like!” Junior looked a little panicky now, and Roxanne wondered if patting him on the head and calling him a good boy would maybe make him feel better.

“Pancakes would be great.” She took his hand, and he blushed again. It seemed like a good moment, so she leaned in a bit, and Junior gave her a startled look that meant he clearly had no idea what she was doing. She took the space back quickly, feeling like a bit of an idiot. 

“Uh, can I walk you to class?” Junior asked, into the vacuum of awkward silence that followed.

“Uh, sure?” Roxanne picked her folder up, and they made their way to the school.

When they reached her classroom door, Junior said, hopefully, “So... I’ll text you?”

“Yeah, that’d be nice.” Roxanne smiled. 

He smiled back, and they were both stuck there for a moment, smiling like twits. Roxanne wondered if she should try leaning in again, but Junior suddenly blurted, “Well, you don’t want to be late!” 

He kissed her on the cheek and ran for it, leaving Roxanne blinking behind him. What was the cue for such things, anyway? Her last kiss had been in a sugar-drunk game of Spin The Bottle with Jeremy Singh, whom she’d known since third grade. They’d gone into the cupboard, and he’d kissed her. His tongue had tasted of Cheetos. She had been squashing the giggles pretty well, but then he said “I’m awfully sorry, Roxanne, but I think I might be gay.” They were still laughing when Lindsay Jerome had opened the door yelling “Time’s up, lovebirds!” It was all friendly enough, but what did you do when you really didn’t want him to come out to you after? She huffed, and dumped herself into her seat. 

 

~*~

The current issue of the school paper was to be the last under her editorship. Despite this, the room had it’s usual sense of deadline day hustle. Looking around, she realised she was going to miss this class more than the others. She was going to miss Mr Summers fidgeting with a pen and then prowling round the desks, poking at things agreeably. Sometimes he’d get bored, and the whole class would be ‘drilled’. Drilling was very simple, and annoying as hell when you were trying to concentrate. For example:

“Attention!” Everyone would stand.

Mr Summers: (glaring) “Apostrophe!”

Class: “Sir, a punctuation mark used to indicate possession or a contraction, sir!”

Mr Summers: (still glaring) “Apostrophe!”

Class: (Louder) “Sir, a punctuation mark used to indicate possession or a contraction, sir!”

Mr Summers: (stalks up to some hapless individual) “You there! Think apostrophes are funny, do you?”

Hapless individual: “Sir, no sir!”

Mr Summers: “Think it’s clever to use the grocer’s apostrophe, do you?”

Hapless individual: “Sir, no sir!”

Mr Summers: “I suppose if it was up to you, we’d all be completely confused about whether the whiskers belonged to the cat, eh?”

Hapless individual: “SIR, NO SIR!”

Mr Summers: “You swaggering rascal, I will not tolerate bad grammar in this classroom. What won’t I tolerate?”

Class: “Sir, crimes against grammar sir!”

Mr Summers: “And you, you scurvy companion, you block, you stone! Drop and give me fifty split infinitives! Go go go!”

She was going to miss Ronnie’s occasional outbursts against post-modernism, Impressionism, and for some reason, Kenneth Branagh. She was even going to miss Carla, who made up for lack of experience and a certain lack of talent with huge amounts of enthusiasm. She’d be a good journalist once she figured out that five-hundred words didn’t mean that you just stopped in the middle of a sentence. Even Hal would make a little space in her life. Whenever she was choked by another man’s aftershave, she would think of him... 

There was something missing in the room. And more importantly, on her desk. She looked up.

“Hey Ronnie, you seen Hal? I haven’t had his reviews off him yet...” 

Ronnie turned round, gripping the back of his chair.

“Didn’t you hear? He’s been expelled.”

“What, really?”

“Yeah, for fighting. You know that weird blue kid? Him and a couple of other guys beat snot out of him last period.”

“What?” Roxanne dropped her pen. “Why?”

“I dunno,” Ronnie shrugged, already losing interest, damn him. “I only heard it off Jeremy Singh, and he got it off that Eddie Arnold guy when he was cleaning out his locker. Dunno where he got it from...”

“I thought you’d be a better journalist than that, Ronnie.” Roxanne was trying for flippant, but she felt all weird and wobbly inside. “Was Junior okay?” 

“Well, have you heard an ambulance recently?” Ronnie picked up his tablet again.

“Now, pupils, no scurrilous gossip in my classroom, if you please. This is a newspaper. ‘Sources claim’ just means someone made it up.” Mr Summers winked at Roxanne, and she tried to smile back. “However, my understanding is that sources claim the lad was driven home by his father in some disarray, although nothing that might be considered serious.”

Roxanne felt something inside unclench a little, and she smiled properly at her teacher. He winked again and swept off to scare the crap out of Carla and her friend Mitzy (no, really) by aggressively interfering in their ‘Leavers Fashion’ spread.

Roxanne wasn’t quite sure how she managed to get anything done after that. Her mind only seemed to be able to concentrate on two things. One, how much longer the school day was, and two, whether it would be weird to cut class and go and see Junior unannounced. It wasn’t that unusual for a friend to visit a friend when they were beaten up by some angry juniors, right? But what if it was, and there was just more awkward leaning and silence, and James wondering what sort of lunatic his son had picked up, and if moving house was too much to get rid of her? What if they just started hiding behind the couch when she came by? But surely she should make sure he was alright. He owed her pancakes, after all. She drummed her fingers on the table, glaring at the cartoon Ronnie had presented for page five. It was a pretty good cartoon, and probably didn’t deserve the fierce scrutiny she was giving it.

“Miss Ritchi, if you continue to do that, you shall receive the standard punishment,” Mr Summers called over. The standard punishment for tapping in class was standing in the hall and clapping iambic pentameter whilst reciting Sonnet 18, which was handily taped to the wall. 

 

At the end of the day, she was decided. The best thing to do would be to casually pop over. If only she hadn’t given him his jacket back, she could have taken it back now. Maybe she could find his locker and steal something, and claim she found it on the back seat. No, wait, that would be crazy. She called Monique.

“Is this important? I’m in a meeting.” 

Roxanne rolled her eyes. “No you’re not, you’re with Lucius.”

“How did you know?” 

“Because you never care if it’s important otherwise.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You can ask Lucius, bet he’s seen it.”

“Huh. Hey, Lucius--”

“No, don’t now. Should I go to Junior’s place?”

“I don’t know, should you?” Monique was eating something again. Probably ice-cream.

“Well, he got beat up by Hal today, and now an undisclosed number of people are expelled and Junior went home with his Dad...”

“Really? Dang, I should have stuck around. I thought he was just gonna bawl the guy out.”

“You saw it?”

“Well, sort of. Hal and a couple of guys. You know, that Ernie Arnold guy, and that other guy he hangs round with... Miguel Zimmerman? Hal was giving it all this ‘You stole her and I want her back’ and Junior was kind of confused, I think. But then I had to go so I guess they must have just beaten him up.”

“...Oh my god.” 

“Are you okay?” 

“Yeah, fine, I’ll talk to you later.” Roxanne hung up and started the Redoubtable Charger on the second go, which was pretty good. Unfortunately, it was entirely clear who ‘she’ was, and it was clear that Hal would never get the message, even if she wrote it across the sky in fireworks with a couple of Native Americans sending up smoke signals. She thumped the steering wheel. Well, maybe getting expelled would be a good hint. She felt a little guilty over that, and that just made her mad. It wasn’t her fault Hal was clearly an obsessive lunatic, and really, it wasn’t exactly her fault that Junior had been whaled on. It also seemed unreasonable to be mad at Junior for allowing a few idiots to beat him into the asphalt, but equally, he should have had the good sense to run away. She didn’t understand how anyone could find two men fighting over them romantic or even remotely pleasing, she just felt guilty and cross. She started mentally composing an editorial on the subject and then remembered she’d already written her last editorial, which just made her sad and a little nostalgic. There were so many emotions sloshing around she thought about driving the car into a sinkhole where she could just lie there and stew for a bit, till she’d sorted out exactly who she was cross with, and why. She was still growling softly when she pulled up in front of Junior’s house. The Crown Victoria was in the driveway, and everything seemed calm as she locked the car and walked across the lawn to the door. James opened it, looking surprised, pleased, and a little worried, all at once. 

“Well hello there young lady, to what do we owe this pleasure?” 

“I heard Junior got... Hurt...” _And it’s all my fault, sort of._

“Oh, well, he’s had worse. Once he fell out of a tree trying to fly.” James stood back to let her come in, smiling.

As she slipped her shoes off, Junior came out of the kitchen. “Dad, the coffee’s done. Oh, er, hello.” Roxanne gasped, just a little. He had a spectacular black eye, as well as a cut across his eyebrow. When he raised his hand in greeting, Roxanne could see a couple of fingers on one hand were strapped up.

“Oh my god, are you okay?”

“It looks worse than it is. And I should get a neat eyebrow scar out of it, with any luck.” Junior grinned. His lip had been cut as well, Roxanne noticed, probably by someone mashing his lip into his teeth. 

“Oh...” She managed, weakly. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting. Obviously, this was preferable to him in a wheelchair with a drip or something, but he seemed entirely unfazed for someone who had a face that looked like a sunrise. 

“I’m gonna go water the garden.” James said, suddenly.

“You don’t have to, I did it yesterday,” Junior protested.

“It’s very hot today.” James replied, levelly, and went out into the kitchen. A moment later, another door banged, ostentatiously. Roxanne was pretty sure she could come to really like James.

“It really doesn’t need doing, it rained last night...” Junior was looking after his Dad, puzzled. 

“Are you going to offer me some coffee?” Roxanne was coming to understand something about Junior, namely that if she didn’t distract him right now, he would go outside and persuade his father to come back inside.

“Oh, sure. Come on through.” He led the way into the kitchen. “I guess you heard what happened at shool then.”

“Yeah, it’s all round now. I’m so sorry, I never thought--”

“It’s okay, it happens.” Junior shrugged his skinny shoulders and poured steaming coffee into big porcelain mugs. “Cream, sugar?”

“Both, please.” Roxanne sat at one of the tall stools round the breakfast bar, dropping her bag to the ground.

Junior added plenty of cream and sugar to one of the mugs, then pushed them over to her, and sat down himself.

Roxanne added considerably less cream and sugar, and realised she was staring. “I’m sorry, but it does look really awful.”

“It hardly hurts at all.” Junior reassured her. “I had an ice-pack on it for like, an hour.”

“But your fingers...” 

“Oh man, that’s not even a thing. When stupid Mr Schwartz pulled Hal away, the ass was stamping about and my hand got in the way. It’s mostly bruised, but Doctor Smith says strapping it will probably help some.”

Roxanne winced, not so much at the injuries but the casual way Junior described them, like getting beaten to a bloody and bruised pulp was something that just happened, like getting a cold. She remembered hearing he’d been to a lot of schools before this one, and the guilt she’d been feeling towards Hal’s poor ego was washed away in a tide of anger. This shouldn’t be the way it was. It just shouldn’t.

“Anyway, how was shool, apart from me righteously burning up the rumour mill?”

Roxanne banged her mug down.

“No.”

“No?”

“No, we don’t get to sit here and pretend it’s no big thing. Someone beat you up! You had to go home from school!” Roxanne was bubbling with anger. “And it’s not fair you have to change schools all the time because it happens so often you just sit in the kitchen and drink coffee!”

“... Did you want juice instead?”

“That’s not the point and you know it!” Roxanne snapped. 

Junior sighed, and finally looked her in the face. “No, it’s not, but that’s how it is. This is what it’s like. You can get as cross as you like, but it’s happened now, and I don’t have to go back. Next year I can do whatever I want. I can go backpacking, or to college, or run away to Vegas and be a showgirl. It doesn’t matter any more, and you feeling bad about it won’t change that.”

The sharpness of his tone pulled Roxanne up short. She didn’t know which was worse, that Junior had said it, or that it made sense. Junior, or Bernard, had mentioned in an email that he was almost done with high-school before everyone else. High school was a thing of the past for him. Silence fell over the breakfast bar. Not uncomfortable, but busy with their own thoughts.

Roxanne felt like she should be the one to break the quiet first. She reached across the table and took his uninjured hand, and he looked up at her, with that familiar hopeful puppy face.

“So... Backpacking huh?”


End file.
